Violence Follows Americans Migrating From Violent States

Americans who grow up in historically violent states may move to a safer state, but they remain far more likely to die violently, according to new research co-authored at the University of California, Berkeley.

In effect, the research finds, people who migrate from states with a strong "culture of honor" bring with them a don't-back-down defensiveness learned in their home communities. That makes them more likely to die by violence wherever they are, says the study led by UC Berkeley political scientist Gabriel Lenz, a specialist in crime and criminal justice.

The study, "Migration and the Persistence of Violence," was published today in the Dec. 2 issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Lenz's co-authors were Martin Vinæs Larsen, an associate professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, and Anna Mikkelborg, a Berkeley Ph.D. graduate and now an assistant professor of political science at Colorado State University.

The findings are based on a study of millions of U.S. deaths since 1959. Because of data constraints, the research focuses on long-term death patterns among white, non-Hispanic Americans, but the findings apply also to Black migrants, said Lenz. The researchers conclude that growing up in states where the culture prizes self-reliance and forceful self-defense - usually in Deep South or long-ago Western frontier states - predisposes people to react aggressively in threatening situations.

As a result, they're more likely to be killed in interpersonal conflicts or by police even after they've relocated to historically safer states, often in the Northeast or northern Midwest, the researchers report. And the elevated risk extends even to married women, people over 75 years old and migrants with more education and higher income.

"Our research suggests that many thousands more people have died than if we lived instead in a world where everyone had grown up in Massachusetts, Minnesota or Vermont, or any of the historically very safe states," Lenz said in an interview.

Lenz explained that the idea for the study emerged when he was conducting research on how the criminal justice system has failed Black Americans. The data showed a pattern: When Black people grew up in states where violence was common, police and courts were hostile and the state did not provide protection, they believed that they had to protect themselves with the help of family or friends.

"When I checked the data for white migrants," he explained, "I was shocked at the extent to which the shadow of earlier homicide rates seemed to be following them around the country."

The findings of the new study suggest a surprising root cause for millions of violent deaths across the past 90 years. In some regions, governments have not been strong enough to provide reliable protection. As a result, the Wild West ethos still shapes American life in those regions - and the safe-unsafe divide parallels today's polarized liberal-conservative politics.

But if government agencies tightened policing and public safety efforts, Lenz said, they might build more trust in the system and reduce residents' belief that they need to take justice into their own hands.

Some places are more violent

Political psychology has been a central focus of Lenz's research. Some of his work has focused on voter behavior, while other research has explored how governments can protect people from violence and incarceration. Next spring, he will teach a course on crime and democracy.

"People don't realize just what a benefit it is to grow up in a safe state. And if you grew up in a frontier location or the Deep South or the Appalachian highlands, it doesn't matter where you move - your risk of victimization follows you."

Among scholars who study homicides, Lenz explained, there are certain patterns that are generally understood: Most lethal violence is male-on-male, and most takes place among people of the same race. Perpetrators might commit homicide, but they are almost as likely to end up dead themselves. "Once violence starts," Lenz explained, "sadly, you just don't know who's going to end up dying."

Generally, rates of homicide are far higher in Appalachian states, the Deep South and the frontier West - states such as Kentucky, Louisiana and Nevada. The patterns extend back decades.

That's the backdrop for the innovative, fine-grained analysis of data carried out by Lenz and his colleagues. Starting in 1933, American death certificates included the deceased's state of birth, gender, the state of death, the cause of death and other basic information. Drawing on those early records to measure each state's 1930s homicide rate, Lenz and his colleagues then examined whether people born in those states continued to face similar risks decades later - tracking migrant deaths in 1959-1961; 1979-1991; and 2000-2017.

Kentucky provides a striking example. It was the most violent state for whites in the 1930s, and even after Kentuckians moved to safer Midwestern states, much of that risk followed them. The dynamic recalls Hillbilly Elegy, written by now-Vice President J.D. Vance; the book portrayed how Appalachian violence and self-reliance persisted long after families left home.

Lenz took the comparison further. The data allowed the researchers to compare a hypothetical white Massachusetts native and a white Kentuckian who moved, for example, to Chicago, considering gender, age, marital status and other factors.

The result? "When we compare those two people," he said, "they will experience on average very different rates of homicide, with the risk much greater for the person from Kentucky."

The authors then illustrate the pattern from a different perspective. "Individuals from, say, Wisconsin - one of the safest states for white residents in the 1930s - maintain a lower risk of violent death even after moving elsewhere," they wrote.

The researchers developed a website that allows users to compare homicide statistics among states and how murder rates change after migration to other states.

America's "culture of honor"

But why does the elevated risk of violence seem to follow some migrants?

To explore the dynamics, the researchers surveyed nearly 7,500 people, both migrants and non-migrants. They asked a range of questions that sought to assess attitudes toward violence and honor: Had the respondents experienced much violence in their lives? To what extent did they perceive that the world around them is dangerous? Did they see themselves as hotheaded?

And a more specific question: Suppose you were drinking in a bar and another patron poured a beer over your head. Would you punch that person? If you just walked away, would you feel like you weren't a 'real man'?

"Residents and migrants from historically unsafe states … see the world as more dangerous, react more forcefully in aggressive scenarios, value toughness, distrust law enforcement and say they rely on self and family in violent situations," the researchers wrote. "These adaptations may have kept them safe in historically dangerous states, but may increase their vulnerability to harm in safer states."

Put another way: It's almost as if the expectation of violence - or the expectation of safety - perpetuates itself across generations, Lenz said.

The researchers stressed that they can't be sure that these culture of honor dynamics fully account for the persistence of violence. The forces that keep violence alive across generations, they note, are hard to pin down with certainty.

"But we think this may help explain why homicide rates are so persistent across generations and regions," Lenz said. "The people most at risk aren't 'evil,' and their homicides aren't the premeditated murders familiar from TV. They're often the product of anger, fear and escalation - situations where people feel they can't back down or rely on the state to protect them."

The racial limitations of the data

In the interview, Lenz explained that the data available allowed for an analysis of death among white migrants, but was not reliable for other migrant groups. To see patterns in the data with precision, the analysts require millions of death records with broad variation in places of birth and death over a period of decades. Further, they need to be able to compare high-risk groups with low-risk groups. Such data only exists for white Americans, he said.

"Black Americans in the 1930s were overwhelmingly born in a small cluster of Southern states, almost all of which had very high homicide rates," Lenz said. "There simply were not enough Black Americans born in low-homicide states in that period," he added, and that made reliable state-by-state analysis of homicide patterns impossible.

Still, Lenz said, the dynamics identified among white migrants "help explain the high homicide rates faced by Black Americans," Lenz said. "Black Americans migrated almost entirely from the most violent states in U.S. history, so the mechanism we document is consistent with what they experience. We just cannot evaluate that mechanism directly using our high-precision migration study design because there is no low-risk comparison group for them."

A similar lack of highly varied data precluded study of Hispanic communities. Many Latinx people arrived well after the study period based on the early 1930s, and their communities were concentrated in a handful of states until the late 20th century. Immigrant communities generally could not be studied because birth records usually are not available, Lenz said.