Enlightening Subject Matter 8: Comparing Crime Rates between Undocumented Immigrants and US Citizens or Others with Authorized Immigration Status
Michael D. Powers, Ph.D., USCCI
US Certified Court Interpreter 1980 / Ph.D. Spanish Portuguese 1981 / 24 years university professor / Estimates: 12,000+ depositions, hearings, etc. / 850 trials / 3000 documents / Conference Interpreter 650 conferences
Enlightening Subject Matter 8: Comparing Crime Rates between Undocumented Immigrants and US Citizens or Others with Authorized Immigration Status
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Although there is conflicting research, by far most of the conclusions indicate undocumented people in the US commit significantly fewer crimes than do those who have authorized ?documentation or immigration status to live here. So if anything, undocumented immigrants are making us better as a whole. Two articles are copied below to give more detail.
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Comparing Crime Rates Between Undocumented Immigrants, Legal Immigrants, and Native-born US Citizens in Texas
NCJ Number
?301717
Journal
?PNAS?Volume: 117?Issue: 51?Dated: December 2020?Pages: 32340-32347
Author(s)
Date Published
?December 2020
Length
?8 pages
Annotation
This study used uniquely comprehensive arrest data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to compare the criminality of undocumented immigrants to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens between 2012 and 2018.
Abstract
The study found that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes. In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over this period. The differences between U.S.-born citizens and undocumented immigrants are robust to using alternative estimates of the broader undocumented population, alternate classifications of those counted as “undocumented” at arrest and substituting misdemeanors or convictions as measures of crime. (publisher abstract modified)
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DECEMBER 7, 2020
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Undocumented Immigrants Are Half as Likely to Be Arrested for Violent Crimes as U.S.-Born Citizens
Some of the most solid evidence to date shows that President Trump’s cornerstone immigration policy was built on a wholly false premise
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People from poor Central American countries—mostly Hondurans—moving toward?the U.S. on their way from La Ventosa to Matias Romero in Mexico’s state of Oaxaca.
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Credit:?
Policy
When Donald Trump?announced?that he was running for president, one of the first issues he raised in his speech was immigration—specifically, the idea that undocumented immigrants are dangerous. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.?And some, I assume, are good people,” he said.
As Trump’s presidency nears its end, his unwavering views on immigration are directly contradicted by a growing body of criminology research. Studies overwhelmingly find no evidence that U.S. immigrants, including those who are undocumented, commit more crimes than native-born Americans. And now a study published in the Proceedings of?the?National?Academy of?Sciences USA?that draws from a detailed and well-sourced data set comes to an even more dramatic conclusion. It reports that between 2012 and 2018, compared with their U.S.-born neighbors, undocumented immigrants in Texas?were less than half as likely to be arrested?for violent crimes or drug offenses and less than a quarter as likely to be arrested for property crimes.
“Simply put, we found that undocumented immigrants have lower felony arrest rates than both legal immigrants and, especially, native-born U.S. citizens,” says study co-author Michael Light, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Charis E. Kubrin, a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the research, describes the paper as “completely groundbreaking.” It’s “another nail in the coffin of what we know about the link between immigration and crime,” she says.
Until now, scientists examining the relationship between immigration and crime had to address the issue broadly in part because many U.S. crime databases do not collect information on immigration status. Research has demonstrated that areas with more immigrants?experience no more crime?than places with fewer of them and that immigration surges do not lead to increases in illegal activity. The same has been shown to be?true for undocumented immigrants?in particular.
But as yet studies have not been able to link a specific immigration status to the rates for specific types of crimes. The new paper is among the first to do so. Light and his team were able to delve into the details after learning that the Texas Department of Public Safety had begun cooperating with the Department of Homeland Security to check and record the immigration status of everyone arrested in the state. He asked if the team could have access to the data, and the Texas officials did not object. It was “a eureka moment,” Light says, because with these new data, he knew he and his colleagues could “do some really interesting work.”
In addition to calculating the crime rates of undocumented and legal immigrants, as well as native-born Americans, Light and his team analyzed undocumented immigrants’ relative contribution to felonies in Texas over the studied period. They found that the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants did not increase with time for certain offenses and even decreased for property, drug and traffic crimes.
Estimating the total population of undocumented immigrants in a particular area can be difficult, and Light concedes that the estimates his team used may not be perfect. To account for potential errors, the researchers calculated how inaccurate their population estimates would have to be to change their findings. They found that the undocumented population in Texas would have to be less than half as large as they had estimated for violent crime rates among such immigrants to match those of U.S.-born Americans. The calculation suggests that their findings are “not due to nuances of data or estimation,” says Bianca Bersani, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, who was not involved in the research.
The new study aligns with other research suggesting that immigration-reducing policies do not prevent crime. After the federal government introduced the?Secure Communities?program, which requires local law enforcement to work with federal immigration officials as a means to expel individuals “who present the most significant threats to public safety,” deportations?increased, but crime?did not?drop. Likewise Kubrin and her colleagues found that when California became a sanctuary state in 2017—limiting state and local police cooperation with federal immigration authorities—crime rates did not rise. “The reality is that immigration policy is not a solution to curb crime,” she says.
Yet Trump has poured resources into the immigration issue. The number of arrests made by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) increased by 30 percent in fiscal year 2017—after Trump signed an?executive order?giving the agency more authority to detain undocumented immigrants. And in fiscal year 2019 the number of people apprehended at the border between U.S. and Mexico?increased to its highest level in 12 years, according to the Pew Research Center.
Researchers are not yet certain why undocumented immigrants are less crime-prone than documented ones or native-born Americans. One contributing factor may be that individuals who emigrate from other countries to the U.S. are highly self-motivated and intrinsically less likely to commit crime. It is also possible that immigrants fear deportation if they are caught, so they are more careful to follow laws. American culture may also play a role. “The longer [immigrants] reside in the United States, the more they adapt to American society, and the more likely their arrest rates resemble those of the native-born,” says Ramiro Martinez, Jr., a quantitative criminologist at Northeastern University.
Although questions on many aspects of the issue remain, what is clear is that the new findings add to a robust body of literature suggesting that undocumented immigrants are not, in fact, criminals. “It’s rare in the social sciences to get such consistent findings,” Kubrin says. “It’s really breathtaking.”
MELINDA WENNER MOYER, a contributing editor at?Scientific American, is author of?How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes: Science-Based Strategies for Better Parenting—from Tots to Teens?(G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021). She wrote about the reasons that autoimmune diseases overwhelmingly affect women in the September 2021 issue.
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