Behind the Model Minority: An Examination of Ethnicity, Place, and Arrests among Asian Youth in Los Angeles Neighborhoods

Background and Aims. Asian ethnic groups are accompanied by diverging migration histories, cultural values, and lived experiences, and these factors play a role in their children’s juvenile justice involvement. While immigrant groups initially settled in ethnic enclaves, they will relocate to ethnoburbs as they achieve higher socioeconomic status. Ethnic enclaves may protect ethnic minority youth against delinquency, but it is currently unknown if residing in an ethnoburb is related to offense type. First, this study determined whether these two ethnic neighborhoods can be differentiated for five Asian ethnic groups. Guided by the spatial assimilation model, I then explored the relationship between ethnicity, ethnic neighborhood, and offense type. Methods. This study employed secondary data analysis of administrative data from the Los Angeles Probation Department and the American Community Survey collected by the United States Census Bureau. Primary individual interviews confirmed the locations of ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. The sample consisted of 980 youth nested within 183 zip codes. Multinomial regression models assessed key relationships; a multilevel approach was used for investigating neighborhood-level effects.Results. Ethnic enclaves and ethnoburbs were classified with a categorical tree using percent ethnicity, percent poverty, and population density, and key informants confirmed these neighborhoods for their respective ethnicities. Koreans have the highest probability of being arrested for a violent crime, Chinese for weapons, Southeast Asian for property, and Japanese for substance and other types of offenses. Compared to living in non-ethnic neighborhoods, living in an ethnoburb was associated with higher risks of being arrested for weapons and substance offenses relative to violence. Finally, youth who live in ethnoburbs that match their ethnicity are at higher risk for being arrested for a weapons offense.Conclusions. That there are ethnic differences in offense type speak to the cultural underpinnings that are associated with each group within the Asian racial category, thus challenging the model minority stereotype that Asians are free of social problems. Because living in an ethnoburb was related to offense type, and especially for youth whose ethnicity matches that of the neighborhood, future research should explore the mechanisms that may explain this association