Previous studies have found that immigrant crime proneness and other socially important traits are strongly predictable from their or their parents' countries of origin, se e.g. [1, 2, 3, 4] and further references cited by these papers.

Should be : see e.g.,

Generally, cognitive measures correlated stronger in the smaller samples, perhaps being inflated by sampling error.

I think I understand what you mean, but you should be careful when you use this word, because some people may believe that you affirm that sampling error causes correlation to be higher, when it's the opposite.

The simple correlations of crime variables and predictors is shown in Table 1.

Table 1: Correlations of predictor variables with crime variables.

Since young men commit most crimes, the most important variables are the crime ages 12-17 and 18-24 for men, both of which show strong correlations with predictors.

3 Predictor vector correlations

etc...

Same problem as before. If you're using correlations, and not regression, the word predictor may be confusing for some people.

Another way to examine it, is to calculate the mean relative crime ratios by age and generation groups.

Is it crime ratio, or is it crime rate (as described in your table 6) ?

Your table 4 shows that the 2nd gen turkish immigrants in Denmark have much higher crime rate than 1st gen. But why so ? Even given the transferability hypothesis, which says that "immigrants tend to keep their psychological traits when they move to a new country" I'm pretty sure that it does not predict that the crime rate will increase so dramatically among 20-29 aged men. I don't think it's due to sample size either. So what happened there ?

Another way to use Table 2.13 on page 128 in the report is to note whether there are differences between first and second generation.

It must be made clear that you're referring to the 2005 Dutch report of crime.

One explanation could be that the Dutch have more success with integration of immigrants.

I think you should cite one reference or two.

Meng Hu,

This is a robust finding we see in other immigrant groups. Many immigrants come from societies where the State has only recently monopolized the use of violence. In such societies, there is still a strong belief that each adult male has the right to use violence on his own behalf and for his kin, and not just for self-defence. A man may legitimately use violence to defend his "honor" or his reputation, or simply to act pre-emptively against a perceived threat. Since the State has not pacified social relations, at least not until recently, there has been no selection to lower the capacity for personal violence, especially among young males.

In this kind of social setting, personal violence is held in check by the threat of retaliation, not only by the victim but also by his kinfolk. There is thus a kind of dynamic equilibrium that keeps violence within reasonable limits (although it continually spills over against unprotected outsiders). Moreover, this equilibrium becomes supported by various cultural prohibitions that further limit the circumstances where antisocial behavior is considered legitimate. People may fear retaliation from the spirit world, for instance. Or there may be taboos of various sorts that discourage doing harm to certain classes of people (children, holy men and women, etc.).

In short, many immigrants come from an environment where violent behavior is possible but nonetheless subject to external constraints, either the threat of retaliation or various cultural prohibitions.

The situation changes when people leave these societies and enter one where such constraints are weak or nonexistent. Violent, antisocial behavior can thus manifest itself more easily. This is less so for the first generation, who are still inculcated with cultural prohibitions that limit violence and other forms of antisocial behavior. This is more so for the next generation, who are more assimilated and correspondingly feel less restrained in their behavior. Ironically, the more assimilated the immigrant community becomes, the more it will diverge behaviorally from its host society.

This divergence will take the form of violence against soft targets. In general, the non-white on white violence we increasingly see is not motivated by hate. It's motivated by a justified perception that "whites don't fight back." Whites are soft targets.

In Western societies, the State has monopolized the use of violence, and in theory the State is supposed to keep such violence in check. It can't because the police were never designed for a situation where almost every young male is a potential threat. Moreover, any effort to contain such violence will disproportionately affect young males from certain ethnic groups. Accusations of racism will inevitably follow.

Emil, maybe you should see if you can incorporate a discussion section regarding Peter Frost's comment. It would also be good if you can find some ways to include the research on personality differences by nations, from David P Schmitt and Robert R McCrae. If I remember correctly, there was an article (I don't remember which one) where McCrae says that some immigrant groups remain similar in behavior to people of the same racial stock who still live in their country of origin, although they differ in some aspect of their personality.

I say this, because until now, the ST hypothesis has only been applied to IQ, and crime. But I wonder if you can generalize the ST hypothesis to all kind of behaviors.

I know that the link between personality and criminality is not well established. For example, Richard Lynn said that psychopathic personality can be an important factor behind delinquent behaviors, and he said that blacks have higher "psychopathic score" than whites, but this view has been now challenged by meta-analytic reviews (although I didn't read them carefully to be fully able to make a critical comment on their works).

However, what I was thinking is that, if personality changes little among immigrants, it is predicted by ST hypothesis, and "may" be an explanation as to why the criminality rate does not change so much between 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. That said, with regard to Frost's comment, I would like to see how the 3rd generation immigrants are doing on delinquent behaviors.

I wanted to see if you had something more to say. It's not as if I have any objections.

However, I would like you to put the entire title in the first post, because now it's this :

Title:
Crime among Dutch immigrant groups

Also,

In Danish reports of concerning immigrant criminality, it has been noted that the second generation is more criminal than the first.[13] However, these analyses did not control for composition changes from the first to the second generation. In order to avoid error from that source, one can look up particular countries of origin and the crime rates among first and second generation.

It's not clear what you mean by composition changes. The last sentence sounds as if you are talking about racial composition. So you should say it explicitly.

Regardless, I approve.

Maybe "composition changes in population's origin" ?

What about the simple "population compositional changes"? Or I can add a footnote?

Yes, that's good. For the second question, just do as you want. It's not too important.

Can anyone else comment on this paper?

Meng Hu has given his approval. Peter Frost commented earlier on. Need 3 more.

Were you not able to correlate the immigrant crime rates in the Netherlands with those in e.g., Norway and Finland. Did the groups not overlap enough?

Also can you check the citations to make sure that they are consistent e.g., always before a punctuation mark with a space preceding them.

Generally, I am fine with this analysis. I approve.