Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905
The Five Points Gang of New York City, which was formed as an Irish American gang, but under the leadership of Italian born "Paul Kelly", Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli. The gang evolved from an entirely Irish gang into an Italian gang, reflecting demographic trends in Five Points.
Well, first of all, I also said there were a lot of benefits to that wave of immigration, but has anybody ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York’? That’s what I’m talking about. We know that when you have these massive ethnic enclaves forming in our country, it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.
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What happens when you have massive amounts of illegal immigration? It actually starts to create ethnic conflict. It creates higher crime rates.
J. D. Vance
Is Vance right?
Keep in mind, I'm just basically fact checking here, not trying to make a political point.
Secondly, Gangs of New York is a horrible motion picture and historically inaccurate.1
So let's start with the two basic assertions. When you have:
- massive ethnic enclaves it can sometimes lead to higher crime rates; and
- massive amounts of illegal immigration creates ethnic conflict and higher crime rates.
Are these assertions correct, based on the historical data?
On the surface, a person could certainly argue yes. The US Mafia was, at its core, an ethic gang. So was the US expression of the Camorra, as were the Chinese Tongs, and as are the various Mexican gangs sometimes loosely referred to as the "Mexican Mafia". All of these entities found their first expression amongst ethnic groups that immigrated into the US, from Sicily, Italy, China and Mexico respectively, and retained their ethnic character thereafter. And the US also saw, in the late 19th Century and into the mid 20th, Irish gangs and Jewish gangs, the latter two of which are largely forgotten.
But then, in examining it, there have also been African American gangs, and still are, as well as Hispanic gangs made up of American born Hispanics.
And, while we commonly do not think of it in this fashion, there have been domestic native born European American gangs. The James Gang was made up entirely of Missourians and was widely tolerated in rural Missouri. The Wild Bunch was a criminal gang with rotating members headquartered in Wyoming and made up entirely of whites. Any number of Depression Era gangs out of Missouri and Oklahoma could also be named.
Hmmm. . . .
So what can we draw from this.
The common element in all of this is poverty. The common thread in the formation of all gangs, at their onset, is that their membership is poor, originally. Gaining wealth is a primary motivating force of gang formation.
Gangs go right to crime, obviously, to address their lack of wealth. The next element of it, however, is that they do form, originally, based on commonality, with the common element being shared ethnicity and status. The Mafia formed originally in Sicily, an impoverished region of what is now Italy, for complicated and obscure reasons, but Sicilian ethnicity was obviously an element of it, and that element was imported into the US. The Camorra was (and is) Neapolitan, and was when it came into the US.2 Sicilians and Neapolitans made up part of the impoverished Italian community that immigrated into the US in the late 19th Century and early 20th Centuries. Indeed, the criminal organizations associated with them basically re-formed in the US, rather than being directly imported.
The James Gang sprang up from impoverished post Civil War rural Missouri with every single memer of it being a white, Protestant, Missourian. The Rollins 40 Crips and the Bloods came from impoverished African American neighborhoods. The Zetas and the Sinolas came out of impoverished communities in Mexico.
So, poverty is an early major motivator.
Poverty, combined with ethnic identity, creates the basic constituents for ethnic gangs. It is, quite frankly, evolutionary biology at work. Humans are tribal by nature, and form tribes in order to acquire and protect resources. Gangs do that, operating in a world in which the members are outsiders due to their poverty and ethnicity.
But therein lies their weakness as well.
Over time, the ethnicity normally dissipates, and its always the case that the members of gangs are a minority of any one ethnicity. Indeed, gangs tend to terrorize the members of their own ethnicities far more than anyone else. As the economic fortunes of the ethnic class rise, being a member no longer retains its original benefits. While being a gang member might offer wealth, it also offers a high risk of shortened life. At a certain point that is a decreasing benefit to the ethnic cohort. To a very large degree this is why the Camorra has largely disappeared in the US, the Mafia is a shadow of its former self, and why Irish and Jewish gangs simply no longer exist.
And ethnicities, moreover, dissipate. To be in the Mafia, originally, you had to be of straight Sicilian descent in the US. Now you must have some Sicilian descent, but it's a decreasing amount.3
So, there's some truth to what Vance related about immigration and crime, but its a much more complicated picture than he relates.
What about ethnic conflict?
Well, as noted part of human nature is tribalism, and an interesting aspect of that is that the "different" both repels and attracts. Large immigrant groups usually do cause some consternation in a prior group, no matter what it is, but contacts nearly immediately arise. Indeed the relatively accurate historical novels Giants In The Earth and Peder Victorious by Ole Edvart Rølvaag do a good job of demonstrating that as, in his novels, a Lutheran Norwegian immigrant family is at first horrified by a Catholic Irish immigrant family moving into their region, only to have a child, Peder, marry into it. Entire ethnicities, such as Creoles in the US and the Mexicans of Mexico are the result of intermixing of cultures. The degree to which a culture is hostile to this varies, with some being very hostile to it, and others not so much. Even where there's pretty strong resistance, however, it happens.
Strife, however, between two cultures in one reason also tends to have a strong common element, that being, once again, poverty. When hostility breaks out between two ethnic groups in a region, it usually features a very strong element of poverty, so in a way, its once again scarcity of resources that is the common problem.
Where's that leave us on Vance's assertion?
Well, its not completely untrue in a superficial way, but in a really in depth manner, its poverty that's the problem. So what we really are looking at is an economic topic, or should be.
Footnotes:
1. Gangs of New York is not only historically inaccurate, its downright perverse.
The movie depicts the New York borough of Five Points in the 1840 through 1860s with a Nativist Protestant gang fighting an Irish Catholic gang, the Dead Rabbits (which was in fact a real gang). New York ethnic gangs in fact existed, but the conglomeration of nativist feelings, Irish immigration in general and Irish gangs is way over the top.
In terms of oddities, Daniel Day Lewis character is just weird.
2. In fact, all the Italian criminal gangs come out of southern Italy, a region of Italy which has been historically impoverished and still is to a significant degree.
3. A movie that depicts this really well is Goodfellas.
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