Immigration and Crime: Here we go again

San Quentin State Prison, by Telstar Logistics - California's prison population is bursting at the seams.

Here we go again. Every few years, another news report comes out to inform us of a study that destroys the "myth" linking immigration and crime, and telling us that immigrants in the United States are actually less likely, not more, to commit crimes than native-born Americans (about 2.5 times less likely, in this case). And predictably, immigration advocates always use these studies to denounce the "racism" of the majority of Americans who want to keep illegal aliens out of the country.

This most recent study by The Public Policy Institute of California, concentrated on California only. The actual report can be found here.(Incidentally, why do these press releases never tell us how to find a copy of the actual study? Are they afraid we might read it for ourselves?)

I'm not going to question the objectivity of the researchers because I have no reason to (yet). But while the intentions may be good, some of their assumptions and methodology are flawed (see below). Also, this study has little to do with the debate on illegal immigration, although it will certainly be spun that way.

1) Here is the main problem: US-born adults have spent far more years of their life, on average, in the country than foreign-born adults. Ergo, they have had more time to rack up crimes and offenses here. If "Joe American" has lived in the United States for all of his 30 years, and "Jose Mexicano", also 30, arrived here only 3 years ago, then Joe has had roughly ten times as long to rack up a criminal record here. Granted, Joe was unlikely to commit many crimes while he was in diapers, but even if you only count the years after he could be tried as an adult (usually age 16) then he has had almost 5 times as long to add offenses to his criminal record. The only way to compare it fairly, would be to add into the equation any criminal offenses these foreign-born people have been convicted for before they entered the United States. This study does take a half-hearted stab at analyzing what it calls "exposure time", but says that it does not entirely "close the gap". No it doesn't, which leads me to my next points. Incidentally, it also throws out the ludicrous theory that spending more time in the US may equal less crime, since it gives people more time to be assimilated. This flies in the face of their own conclusions, unless they think that native-born US citizens have somehow not assimilated themselves!

2) The study doesn't include those held in federal prisons. This is significant, because the number of legal/illegal immigrants in federal prisons is far higher. The authors claim that the federal system holds only 8 percent of all prison inmates nationwide, so the number wouldn't affect the study very much. But they don't compare this number to California only, just nationwide in general. And they must know that the federal system doesn't hold people for things like non-payment of parking tickets; those in federal prisons are far more likely to have committed a more serious offense, to put it mildly, which leads to my next point below.

3) The study doesn't compare types of crimes between these groups. If, for example, the majority of crimes by citizens are property crimes, and by foreign-born are violent ones, that would make a difference, no? Probably the worst crime in US history was the 9/11 attacks, which were primarily committed by men who were in the US illegally at that time.

4) The real issue is illegal, not legal immigrants. If legal immigrants commit less crime than natives, great! Let's get more of them. But this is not terribly surprising, because they are supposed to have a criminal background check before receiving a resident alien card. But illegal immigrants have a 100% crime rate to begin with, since the very act of entering the country illegally is a crime. The authors concede that they have no way of dividing immigrants into legal/illegal, since the law enforcement often doesn't even ask this question or verify immigration status on a suspect. But they should go a bit further - how confident are they that the US citizens in the study are in fact US citizens? A Mexican arrested in California has every reason in the world to claim he was born in the US in order to avoid deportation, and if he can't actually prove his place of birth, so what? Are the police going to refuse to arrest a man because he can't produce his birth certificate?

5) Some portions of this study are certainly going to be ignored by immigration activists; I think the wildly disproportionate amount of the US black population in prison shown in Fig. 9 is likely to make some very uncomfortable indeed.

In any case, if immigrants are underrepresented in crime statistics overall, I think that's great news. But it doesn't change my feelings on iota about illegal immigrants, and this study reads like another attempt to conflate illegal/legal under the same umbrella, so that anyone who opposes illegal immigration can be simply smeared as "anti-immigrant".




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