EFFECTS OF IMMIGRATION OX HOMICIDE 163 



number being now held for murder. That there is danger in the 

 vast increase of immigration from southern Italy is evidenced by the 

 fact that of each one hundred thousand of alien Italians in this country 

 50.2 are held for murder. There is no question here of race prejudice, 

 as may be seen by the following diagram (Fig. 3). 



Unfortunately, the tendency of immigrants is to concentrate in 

 large cities. The proportion of foreigners is about four times greater 

 in the 161 cities of over 25,000 inhabitants than in the remainder of 

 the country; hence the relation of increasing immigration to the in- 

 crease of crimes of violence can 

 be best studied through the police 

 records of large cities. Naturally, 

 such a task is fraught with many 

 difficulties, owing to the want of 

 adequate data. By confining the 

 scope of the present inquiry to the 

 effect of immigration on crimes 

 involving the loss of human life, 

 and by comparing prison statistics 

 with the reports of chiefs of police, 

 sheriffs and health officers, many 

 obstacles, insuperable in any study 

 of wider scope, are avoided. 



As the records of our penal in- 

 stitutions show which elements of 

 our foreign population are most 

 given to homicide, those cities 

 should have the higher ratios of 

 arrests for homicide which con- 

 tain the greater proportions of 

 aliens from the countries shown 

 in the figure to produce the 

 greater proportions of murderers. 

 But there are many disturbing 

 factors to be reckoned with, chief of 

 which is the presence in many of 

 our cities of large numbers of a socially inferior race of native-born 

 citizens,- the negroes. The United States Census Keport on Crime, for 

 1880, shows that the tendency among negroes towards crimes against 

 the person was 100 per cent, greater than among the native whites. 

 The report for 1890 shows that the negroes had been convicted of three 

 times more homicides in proportion to their number than had the 

 foreign whites; whilst as compared with the native white population 

 they appear to have been about six times more murderous. Nearly two 

 thirds of the prisoners charged with murder were in the south. 



Fig. 3. Table showing Number of 

 Foreigners held for Murder in American 

 Penal Institutions, with their Ratio per 

 100,000 of Population. 



