nullifidian (blogroll)

Here in the United States, and in many other nations as well, it is difficult to avoid the debate over immigration and immigration reform. I have, however, mostly avoided posting on the topic. The term shows up in a few posts, true, but mostly it is peripheral.

Among the issues related to immigration are health care costs, public service costs, and immigration’s effect on such things as tax revenue, jobs, business, and crime. This latter particularly grates at me.

I realize that it simply isn’t possible to have unrestricted borders, however ideologically appealing that might be to some. Still, the argument from crime annoys me. It annoys me because this is not my experience with immigrants. My experience, while not conclusive in any sense, is much the opposite. My experience is that immigrants are ridiculously hard workers. I wouldn’t even enter that contest. This, obviously, might mean that there is something to arguments revolving around jobs and business. It doesn’t fit well with the idea that immigrants are criminals. But that is anecdote. I took a look around.

It is remarkably easy to find assertions that immigrants commit proportionally more crime than do natives in a population. Take, for example, “It’s Your Ass Folks” from FreedomFolks.

• The reality is that, for a number of reasons, first-generation immigrants generally have lower propensities for crime than their native-born counterparts. Included among these are that immigrants are generally older than the crime-prone generation (15-24); often better educated, better employed; desirous of assimilation, and mindful of the customs of their birth country.

  IMMIGRANTS AND CRIMINALITY:A META SURVEY

• In fact, immigrants have the lowest rates of imprisonment for criminal convictions in American society. Both the national and local-level findings presented here turn conventional wisdom on its head and present a challenge to criminological theory as well as to sociological perspectives on “straight-line assimilation.”
  For every ethnic group without exception, the census data show an increase in rates of criminal incarceration among young men from the foreign-born to the US-born generations, and over time in the United States among the foreign born — exactly the opposite of what is typically assumed both by standard theories and by public opinion on immigration and crime.

  
  Debunking the Myth of Immigrant Criminality: Imprisonment Among First- and Second-Generation Young Men

• Our sociological knowledge of crime is fragmented and ineffective in challenging and correcting mistaken public perceptions, for example, linking immigration and crime. These misperceptions are perpetuated by government reports of growing numbers of Hispanic immigrants in U.S. prisons. However, Hispanic immigrants are disproportionately young males who regardless of citizenship are at greater risk of criminal involvement. They are also more vulnerable to restrictive treatment in the criminal justice system, especially at the pre-trial stage. When these differences are integrated into calculations using equations that begin with observed numbers of immigrants and citizens in state prisons, it is estimated that the involvement of Hispanic immigrants in crime is less than that of citizens. These results cast doubt on the hypothesis that immigration causes crime and make more transparent the immigration and criminal justice policies that inflate the rate of Hispanic incarceration. This transparency helps to resolve a paradox in the picture of Mexican immigration to the United States, since by most measures of well-being, Mexican immigrants are found to do as well and sometimes better than citizens.

  Sociological Criminology and the Mythology of Hispanic Immigration and Crime

• Using data from the Uniform Crime Reports and the Current Population Surveys, we find, in the cross section, that cities with high crime rates tend to have large numbers of immigrants. However, controlling for the demographic characteristics of the cities, recent immigrants appear to have no effect on crime rates. In explaining changes in a city’s crime rate over time, the flow of immigrants again has no effect, whether or not we control for other city-level characteristics. In a secondary analysis of individual data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), we find that youth born abroad are statistically significantly less likely than native-born youth to be criminally active.

  Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime

Still, others manage to find impressive numbers for immigrant crime. How? In general, I’m not sure. Several concerns have been floating through my head, though. One is bias.

John Hagan of the University of Toronto and Alberto Palloni of the University of Wisconsin also found a weak link between immigration and crime.12 Examining criminal justice data in two U.S. border cities, El Paso and San Diego, Hagan and Palloni argued immigrants are disproportionately represented among prison inmates because of biases in processes that lead from pre-trial detention to sentencing. The criminal justice system views immigrants as potential “flight risks,” they noted, and thus detains many suspects who otherwise (as citizens) would not be detained. The authors concluded that incarceration rates, depending on the national origin of the criminal, exaggerate by anywhere from three to seven times the crime rates of immigrants relative to citizens.

An Examination of U.S. Immigration Policy and Serious Crime

I also wonder how much the mere fact that an illegal alien is illegal effects the crime figures. Someone in a country illegally has committed a crime, but an arrest made merely illegal status should not be counted when calculating the criminal propensities of illegal aliens. Doing so skews the numbers. It would be like comparing Catholic and Protestant arrest rates while counting “Catholic” itself as being a crime.