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In this article the authors examine the impact of recent immigration on rates of serious property crime across communities in Austin, Texas. The greater Austin foreign-born population has increased by more than 580 percent since 1980, and Austin is considered a "pre- emerging" immigrant gateway city to the United States. The changing population dynamics in Austin provide an excellent opportunity to study the effect of recent immigration on crime in a target destination for recent immigrants. Although interest in the relationship between violent crime and immigration to new locales is evidenced by recent studies that show less favorable outcomes for Latinos in new destinations, little attention has been directed to the relationship of recent immigration with serious property crime in new destinations. Negative binomial regression models with corrections for spatial autocorrelation indicate that recent immigration is not associated with an increased rate of burglary, larceny, or motor vehicle theft once important structural predictors of crime are controlled for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the effect of recent immigration on homicide rates across city of Austin, Texas census tracts is examined. Since 1980, Austin's recent immigrant population increased by more than 580% across the metropolitan area and it is now considered a "pre-emerging" immigrant gateway city to the United States. Therefore the changing population dynamics in Austin provide an excellent opportunity to study the effect of recent immigration on homicide. After controlling for structural predictors of homicide and correcting for spatial autocorrelation, our findings indicate that recent immigration is not associated with homicide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]