Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue

By Steven A. Camarota, Jessica Vaughan
November 2009

Backgrounders and Reports
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http://www.cis.org/articles/2009/crime.pdf

Steven A. Camarota is Director of Research and Jessica M. Vaughan is Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

This study examines academic and government research on the question of immigrant crime. New government data indicate that immigrants have high rates of criminality, while older academic research found low rates. The overall picture of immigrants and crime remains confused due to a lack of good data and contrary information. However, the newer government data indicate that there are legitimate public safety reasons for local law enforcement to work with federal immigration authorities.

Among the findings:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimates that immigrants (legal and illegal) comprise 20 percent of inmates in prisons and jails. The foreign-born are 15.4 percent of the nation’s adult population. However, DHS has not provided a detailed explanation of how the estimates were generated.


Under contract to DHS in 2004, Fentress, Inc., reviewed 8.1 million inmate records from state prison systems and 45 large county jails. They found that 22 percent of inmates were foreign-born. But the report did not cover all of the nation’s jails.


The 287(g) program and related efforts have found high rates of illegal alien incarceration in some communities. But it is unclear if the communities are representative of the country:
Maricopa County, Ariz.: 22 percent of felons are illegal aliens;
Lake County, Ill.: 19 percent of jail inmates are illegal aliens;
Collier County, Fla.: 20 to 22 percent of jail inmates and arrestees are illegal aliens;
Weld County, Colo.: 12.8 to 15.2 percent of those jailed are illegal aliens.

DHS states that it has identified 221,000 non-citizens in the nation’s jails. This equals 11 to 15 percent of the jail population. Non-citizens comprise only 8.6 percent of the nation’s total adult population.


The Federal Bureau of Prisons reports that 26.4 percent of inmates in federal prisons are non-U.S. citizens. Non-citizens are 8.6 percent of the nation’s adult population. However, federal prisons are not representative of prisons generally or local jails.


A Pew Hispanic Center study found that, of those sentenced for federal crimes in 2007, non-citizen Hispanics were 74 percent of immigration offenders, 25 percent of drug offenders, 8 percent of white collar offenders, and 6 percent of firearms offenders. Non-citizen Hispanics are 5.1 percent of the nation’s adult population. However, the report does not provide information for other crimes or for non-Hispanic immigrants.


Recent reports by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) and Immigration Policy Center (IPC) showing low rates of immigrant incarceration highlight the data problems in many studies. The 2000 Census data they used are not reliable.


An analysis of the data used in the PPIC and IPC studies by the National Research Council found that 53 percent of the time the Census Bureaus had to make an educated guess whether a prisoner was an immigrant. The studies are essentially measuring these guesses, not actual immigrant incarceration.


The poor quality of data used in the PPIC and IPC studies is illustrated by wild and implausible swings. It shows a 28 percent decline in incarcerated immigrants 1990 to 2000 — yet the overall immigrant population grew 59 percent. Newer Census data from 2007 show a 146 percent increase in immigrant incarceration 2000 to 2007 — yet, the overall immigrant population grew only 22 percent.


The Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities shows that 8.1 percent of prisoners in state prisons are immigrants (legal and illegal). However, the survey excludes jails and relies on inmate self-identification, which is likely to understate the number of immigrants.


In 2009, 57 percent of the 76 fugitive murderers most wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) were foreign-born. It is likely however that because immigrants can more readily flee to other countries, they comprise a disproportionate share of fugitives.


Most studies comparing crime rates and immigration levels across cities show no clear correlation between the immigrant share of a city’s population and its level of crime. This is one of the strongest arguments that immigrants do not have high crime rates. However, such studies generally measure only overall crime, not crimes specifically committed by immigrants, so their value is limited. And a 2009 analysis by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration Statistics found that crime rates were higher in metropolitan areas that received large numbers of legal immigrants, contradicting several older cross-city comparisons.


From 1998 to 2007, 816,000 criminal aliens were removed from the United States because of a criminal charge or conviction. This is equal to about one-fifth of the nation’s total jail and prison population. These figures do not include those removed for the lesser offense of living or working in the country illegally. The removal and deportation of large numbers of criminal aliens may reduce immigrant incarceration rates because many will not return and re-offend, as is the case with many native-born criminals.


Some have argued that the fall in national crime rates since the early 1990s is evidence that immigration may actually reduce crime. However, overall crime rates are affected by so many factors that it is a very poor way to examine a link between immigration and crime. The 1970s and 1980s saw crime rates rise along with immigration levels.


Overall incarceration rates are also a poor means of examining the link between immigration and crime. Since the 1970s, the share of the U.S. population that is incarcerated has grown almost exactly in proportion to the share of the population that is immigrant. But unless inmates can be identified as immigrant or native-born this information sheds little light on the issue of immigrant criminality.


A central problem when looking at prison populations is that many inmates have been imprisoned for a long time. Therefore, today’s prison population partly reflects the nation’s demographics of earlier years when immigrants were a smaller fraction of the population. To make an accurate comparison one has to adjust for length of sentences and the growth of the immigrant population over time.

Introduction

Preventing the admission of criminals has long been a concern to the public and policy makers. Even in the colonial period, there were laws against the arrival of criminals. Laws barring admission to the United States for those who have committed certain crimes remain in force today. A significant share of the public seems to believe that immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime. High-profile and sometimes tragic crimes committed by illegal aliens have prompted state and local officials to pledge action to rid the community of criminal aliens. Top federal immigration officials, as well as top congressional and executive branch officials, emphasize repeatedly that aliens who commit crimes are a top enforcement priority, partly by launching big-ticket programs to accelerate the pace of removals. Meanwhile, many advocates for immigrants and other immigration law enforcement skeptics insist that this attention is misplaced. They cite academic research claiming that immigrants actually are less prone to crime than natives.

This report explores the question of immigration and crime and finds that there is very little conclusive data to inform the well-entrenched views on both sides of the debate. We reviewed the major academic and government reports on the topic and found that these studies lead to contrary conclusions about immigration and crime. Moreover, the crime or incarceration data that do exist often are of limited value because they are unrepresentative in some way. It is also difficult to conclude much about crime associated with legal immigrants versus illegal immigrants. However, there is some indication that illegal immigrants have relatively high rates of crime, while legal immigrants have relatively low rates of crime.

In this report we use the words immigrant and foreign-born interchangeably. The foreign-born or immigrants are defined as persons living in the United States who were not U.S. citizens at birth.1 The foreign-born include non-citizens, both legal and illegal, as well as naturalized American citizens. The report is divided into three main parts: The first is a general discussion of why it is so difficult to study this question. Next, we focus on prior research that examined this question. In particular we focus on two recent studies that examined immigrant incarceration and the studies’ problems, particularly the lack of good data. Third, we examine new data that have become available as federal, state, and local governments have begun making a greater effort to ascertain and track the immigration status of criminal offenders. We also explore the limitations of this new data.

To read the entire comprehensive report, please go to:
http://cis.org/ImmigrantCrime