DIFFERENTIAL SUSCEPTIBILITY? IMMIGRANT YOUTH AND PEER INFLUENCE

There is reason to suspect that lower levels of exposure to criminogenic peer-based risks help explain why immigrant youth are less involved in crime and violence. However, it also is possible that if and when they do encounter these risks, immigrant youth are more vulnerable to them than are native-born youth. Drawing from literature on the adaptation experiences of immigrant adolescents, we hypothesize that immigrant youth will be relatively more susceptible to the effects of both 1) exposure to deviant peers and 2) unstructured and unsupervised socializing with peers when compared with their nonimmigrant counterparts. Using a sample of approximately 1,800 adolescents from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN) study, we find support for our first hypothesis but not the second. Specifically, in both cross-sectional and longitudinal models, we find that exposure to deviant peers has a greater impact on violence among immigrant youth than it does for native-born youth. Furthermore, this pattern of results is supported with supplemental, sensitivity analysis using the AddHealth data. In contrast, there are no statistically significant differences across immigrant generation status with regard to the effect of informal socializing with peers on violence.