The link behind immigrants and crime

11:05 PM CST on Friday, March 9, 2007

By Lee McGuire / 11 News

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Polls show that about 70 percent of us believe that an increase in immigrants will lead to an increase in crime.


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Study finds that immigrants, illegal or otherwise, are less likely to commit a crime.
We wanted to know if that is true, so 11 News looked through census numbers and a few decades of studies. What the numbers indicated is that the link between immigration and crime may be exactly the opposite of what you believe.

Take a look at any group of adult immigrants from Mexico, legal or illegal, and statistics show that each of them will be about four times less likely to commit a crime that the rest of the U.S. population.

But it’s a different story for their children, who are about eight times more likely to go to jail than their parents.

“We’re gonna reap what we’ve sewn in regard to these children being on the loose,” Texans for Immigrant Reform President Louise Whiteford said.

She thinks she knows why it is that the longer the child of an immigrant lives in the United States, the more likely it is that that person will commit a crime.

“It’s like Romeo and Juliet,” she said. “You’ve got teenagers out there who don’t fit in maybe as well as they would like to into society, and they start running in groups and gangs.”

Rice University professor Mark Jones said this has more to do with economics than national origin.

“No, Latinos are just behaving like other Americans in similar situations,” Jones said. “I think so; I think what we’re really talking about is the socioeconomic status, and its relationship to delinquency in the United States. Immigration has very little to do with it.”

The pattern is true no matter what country an immigrant is from, but one factor has been shown to prevent that from happening: graduating from high school.

“The reality is, if you don’t graduate from high school, you will choose another path,” LULAC spokesman Jose Jimenez said.

And the numbers show it: According to the census, at any given time about 3 percent of U.S. adults are in prison. But just 0.7 percent of first-generation Mexican immigrants are incarcerated. If their children don’t graduate high school, their incarceration rate is 10 percent. If they do, only about 4 percent end up in prison. That’s not much higher than the national average.

It's why LULAC Houston is concerned that a program designed to help the children of immigrants get vocational training and graduate high school just lost federal funding.

“Immigration isn’t dangerous,” Jimenez said. “What is dangerous is we don’t care for the generations coming up. This is not only an immigrant situation, this is across the board.”

It’s a problem that has confronted America, and its immigrants, for more than a century: One that could only be compounded now that nearly one quarter of all people in this country are either a first-generation immigrant, or have parents who are
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