A UC Berkeley coauthored study says your hometown may never really let you go: Americans who grow up in historically violent states face a higher risk of dying violently even after they pack up and move to safer parts of the country. The work flips the standard migration story, suggesting that early habits, norms, and expectations from a birthplace, not just current neighborhoods, help determine who is most likely to end up a homicide statistic.
What the paper did
The paper, "Migration and the Persistence of Violence," was published last Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is led by UC Berkeley political scientist Gabriel Lenz with coauthors Martin Vinæs Larsen and Anna Mikkelborg. Drawing on millions of death records, the team tracked people born in different states across three time periods and tested whether historical homicide rates in a person’s state of birth still predicted violent death decades later, even after they moved, according to PNAS.
Culture of honor as a mechanism
The researchers argue that a durable "culture of honor" a do-not-back-down defensiveness learned in dangerous environments helps explain why the risk follows migrants. To probe attitudes behind the numbers, the team surveyed nearly 7,500 Americans and found that migrants from historically unsafe states were more likely to see the world as dangerous and to support forceful responses. As the authors put it, "residents and migrants from historically unsafe states see the world as more dangerous," according to UC Berkeley News.
How the team tested it
To measure how long these patterns last, the authors used state of birth homicide rates derived from death certificate records starting in the 1930s, then tracked migrant deaths in three windows: 1959 to 1961, 1979 to 1991, and 2000 to 2017. They asked whether birthplace risk still showed up in those later deaths. According to PNAS, the pattern held across age, gender, and marital status, and even among migrants with higher incomes and more education. The authors note that their core statistical design focuses on white, non-Hispanic Americans, because early 20th century birth patterns limit how much variation they can study in other groups.
How big is the effect?
The numbers are not small. One synopsis of the work reports that from 2000 to 2017, white migrants from historically violent states suffered about 26,900 homicide deaths, and the authors estimate roughly 6,000 of those might not have occurred if those migrants had faced the homicide risk of a historically safe state. That summary, available via GrowKudos, also directs readers to an online interactive explorer for the paper’s state by state comparisons.
Policy and prevention
For policymakers, the message is that migration alone is not a magic reset button. Long learned defensive behaviors do not automatically disappear when someone crosses a state line. The authors argue that building institutional trust and strengthening public safety are key to lowering the perceived need for private self defense. Lenz suggests that better policing and public safety efforts "might build more trust" in institutions and reduce residents' belief that they must take justice into their own hands, according to UC Berkeley News. Federal guidance that links enforcement with community engagement reflects a similar approach, as outlined by the Office of Justice Programs.
What it means locally
For Bay Area readers, there is a home field angle. The lead author is based at UC Berkeley, and the study reframes migration as a social process that carries behavioral legacies alongside economic opportunity. Violence reduction experts argue that combining evidence based enforcement with community programming and research partnerships can cut harm while building public trust. That strategy is promoted by the National Institute of Justice and other federal partners, and this new Berkeley work adds more data to the case that where people start in life can shape safety outcomes long after they move away.
