What is it about?
This study asks a simple question: do people carry the risk of violence from the places they grew up? We use U.S. death-certificate data spanning nearly a century to track millions of Americans born in states that were more or less violent in the 1930s. We then follow them as they move across the country. The key finding is stark: people born in historically violent states remain more likely to die by homicide even after they relocate to much safer places. This pattern holds across three very different eras of U.S. violence and across many demographic groups, including the elderly and higher-income migrants. A large national survey shows that people from historically dangerous states also carry with them a defensive outlook on the world—greater mistrust of authorities, higher reliance on family for protection, and a readiness to respond forcefully to threats—consistent with what scholars call a culture of honor.
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Why is it important?
The scale of this persistence is large enough to matter in human lives. From 2000–2017, white migrants from historically violent states suffered roughly 26,900 homicide deaths. If those same migrants had carried the homicide risk of a historically safe state such as Wisconsin, we estimate that about 6,000 of those violent deaths would not have occurred. That is a meaningful loss of life tied not to where people live, but to where they were born. The risks linked to being born in a dangerous state are comparable in size to major correlates of homicide, such as the entire decline in risk from aging from 20 to 80 or roughly half the Black–white homicide gap. And the persistence appears across eras, demographics, and destinations. These patterns matter because they show how deeply early environments shape later vulnerability. The roots of violence are not confined to current conditions but reflect durable adaptations people carry with them. Understanding those adaptations is essential for explaining why violence remains uneven across the United States — and why it has proved so hard to reduce.
Perspectives
Around the world, millions of people migrate from places where institutions are weak and personal security depends on handling danger yourself. In those settings, people learn to be their own police officers: rely on family for protection, act quickly when threatened, and treat authorities with caution. These strategies are rational in environments where the state cannot keep you safe. What our study shows is that these defensive habits don’t disappear just because someone moves to a safer society. They travel with people. And when they do, outsiders often misinterpret these behaviors as aggression rather than self-protection. That misunderstanding is global, not just American. If we want migrants from weak-institutional settings to thrive, we need to do more than ask them to trust our institutions. We need to show, in concrete ways, that our institutions will protect them. When people believe that the police and courts will keep them safe, they have less reason to handle justice and defense privately. That trust—earned, not demanded—may be the path to reducing the risks they carry with them.
Gabriel Lenz
University of California Berkeley
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Migration and the persistence of violence, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 2025, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2500535122.
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