Thread: The link behind immigrants and crime

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.


11 News

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
http://www.khou.com/news/local/crime/st ... c763.html#

Hmm... this seems to contradict. Which do you believe? Why do they always mix immigrants and illegal immigrants? Because legal immigrants scew the numbers drastically.

New Mexico's new attorney general has asked the federal government for more funds and additional federal agents to protect the border.

Gary King, just two months into his first term as New Mexico's top law enforcer, said the border is a troubled area suffering from a series of violent crimes.

This week he asked the U.S. attorney general for help.

"They have to keep their promises to spend the kind of money necessary to have federal resources on the border," King said.

"The federal dollars for crime enforcement have actually dropped. We're trying to encourage the federal government to bring us up that level."

King is also pushing for more border agents and for more high-tech surveillance equipment near the U.S.-Mexico divide to prevent illegal immigrants from crossing.

Bush administration critics in Washington contend the best way for the federal government to protect the New Mexico border is to build a border fence.

John Keeley of the Center for Immigration Studies said, "Now more so that ever, we have an all-time high illegal alien population. We have a real crisis on our hands with the porous nature of our border."

King said he opposed the border fence and would prefer the government spend money to train more border agents.

With regard to the federal funds for New Mexico, the administration has cut about 60 percent of the money for local prosecutors to help combat crimes

People Who Violate Immigration Laws are More Likely to Violate Other Laws, Finds the Federation for American Immigration Reform
Posted on : Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:02:59 GMT
Author : Federation for American Immigration Reform




WASHINGTON, March 9 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A recent study by the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) purported to show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes in this country than the general population. The results of the IPC report, "The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation," are misleading because they lump legal and illegal immigrants together, finds an analysis done by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

Not surprisingly, legal immigrants, who are screened for criminal records before being admitted to the United States, tend not to engage in criminal activities once in the country. The same is not the case for illegal aliens, who constitute the fastest growing share of the foreign-born population. An examination of official data on the U.S. prison population reveals that they represent a larger share of the overall prison population than their presence in the country.

"IPC, which is part of the network of advocacy groups lobbying for an illegal alien amnesty, is clearly fudging the facts to advance their political objectives," said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "Local law enforcement authorities are correct to be concerned about growing populations of illegal residents because, on average, they are more likely to commit crimes. A new study we are releasing today shows that deportable aliens nationwide were nearly twice as likely to be incarcerated for crimes as their share of the population."

The findings of the IPC report, which gained widespread media attention, are belied by mounting evidence that illegal immigration is directly linked to violent crime in this country. Federal and local law enforcement agencies have announced urgent new initiatives to deal with growing gang violence, perpetrated by transnational criminals. Among the illegal alien criminals are possible terrorists, drug and human traffickers, child predators, drunk and hit-and-run drivers, murderers, and all classes of other felons.

"Our failure to control illegal immigration poses a real and documentable risk to the security of the American people," Stein asserted. "Innocent Americans are often victims of personal and property crimes committed by illegal aliens. The American public is not paranoid and they are not misperceiving reality. Illegal aliens are more prone to criminal activity than the rest of the population, a fact that points up the urgent need for Congress and the Bush Administration to regain control of our borders and enforce laws against illegal immigration."

Federation for American Immigration Reform


http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show ... 2328.shtml

don't believe the polls, here's a study you can read on this subject.