With the Foundation's support, Carolyn Moehling and Anne Morrison Piehl have released a working paper on historical patterns of immigrant incarceration. Here is the abstract:

The analysis of a new dataset on state prisoners in the 1900 to 1930 censuses reveals that immigrants rapidly assimilated to native incarceration patterns. One feature of these data is that the second generation can be identified, allowing direct analysis of this group and allowing their exclusion from calculations of comparison rates for the “native” population. Although adult new arrivals were less likely than natives to be incarcerated, this likelihood was increasing with their years in the U.S. The foreign born who arrived as children and second generation immigrants had slightly higher rates of incarceration than natives of native parentage, but these differences disappear after controlling for nativity differences in urbanicity and occupational status. Finally, while the incarceration rates of new arrivals differ significantly by source country, patterns of assimilation are very similar.

In the paper's introduction, Mohelin and Piehl explain how their paper addresses key gaps in current research on immigrant assimilation:

While many studies have examined the assimilation of immigrants to the U.S. in terms of labor market and educational outcomes both historically (e.g., Abramitzky et al. 2012) and for recent cohorts (e.g., Card 2005, Smith 2006), few have focused on crime patterns. Given the higher measured rates of criminal behavior among natives, assimilation of immigrant groups to native crime patterns cannot be viewed as a marker of success as is assimilation in a measure like occupational distribution or years of schooling. Nonetheless, it would indicate a convergence in experience and perhaps a narrowing of the cultural and social distances between the immigrant and native populations. Moreover, documenting the changes in immigrant crime patterns with time in the U.S. and across generations may provide greater insight into theories of criminal behavior, particularly those developed in the 1920s to explain the perceived connection between immigration and crime.

Read the full paper here.