An Inquiry into the Impact of Immigrant Generation on Offending and Victimization Trajectories

As scholarship continues to explore immigrant involvement in crime, immigrant-focused, criminological inquiries at the individual-level have only begun to gather traction. While the bulk of available evidence suggests earlier immigrant generations fare better on antisocial outcomes, deliberate study into immigrant generational status and its association with both criminal offending and victimization are few and far between. Using a mixture of open and restricted traditional and monthly calendar data from the Pathways to Desistance study, this study examines how immigrant generations—five in total ranging from first-generation to 3.5-generation—impact criminal offending and violent victimization trajectories from adolescence to early adulthood. Moreover, the current study examines and controls for time-invariant and time-variant factors relevant to assimilationist theories, developmental and life-course perspectives, and the victim-offender overlap. The results suggest immigrant generation had little impact on aggressive criminal offending and offending and victimization trajectories examined jointly; however, early immigrant generations were more likely to predict membership to some higher violent victimization trajectories. These findings may reflect how immigrant resiliencies against offending and victimization outcomes engage with the criminal justice experiences of the sample to further disadvantage individuals closer to the immigrant designation.