From the anecdotal evidence conservatives have been circulating as the immigration issue heats up again, you’d sure think that illegal immigrants commit more crime than legal immigrants. But conservatives should be careful about what selective evidence they present in support of their argument.
As Congress prepares to debate a bill that would provide a pathway to citizenship for 11 million aliens, one counterargument is that illegals are a risk due to higher criminality. The murder of ranchers and border patrol agents in the wake of Arizona’s tough immigration bill indicates chaos and mayhem under a policy of open immigration.
And President Obama’s irresponsible act of releasing hundreds of felonious aliens after the recent sequester spending cuts, didn’t help the argument in favor of citizenship.
Though controlled studies are far from readily available, the FBI reported that violent crime has decreased 17 percent in border city San Diego over the past decade, 10 percent in border city Phoenix, and 10 percent overall in the border state Arizona. In El Paso, which sits directly across from crime-ridden Juarez, Mexico, and whose residents are three-quarters Hispanic and one-quarter foreign-born, it is down a whopping 36 percent.
New York police statistics show that communities with high numbers of first-generation immigrants have seen dramatic drops in crime rates—even larger than those experienced by the city as a whole. One possible explanation is that immigrants willing to move into run-down areas reduce the number of vacant buildings and storefronts and revitalize the neighborhood.
Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes increased immigration, admits, “There’s no evidence that immigrants—or even illegal immigrants—are necessarily any more or less likely to be committing crimes than the population at large. It’s just that they tend to be associated with certain types of crimes—drug trafficking, for example.”
The National Bureau for Economic Research found that immigrants (legal and illegal) had one-fifth the incarceration rate of non-immigrants between 1980 and 2000, an effect due not to increased deportation but self-selection and deterrence. Namely, immigrants were less criminally inclined than native residents, and were especially sensitive to the possibility of criminal charges that might tear asunder the lives they had come here to build.
CBS News did report that illegal immigrants are twice as prevalent in the Arizona prison system as in the general population. But that doesn’t mean illegals are committing more crimes, just that they’re getting caught more. Arizona recently empowered police and border agents to be more vigilant in checking the papers of “suspicious” individuals, so it’s no surprise they’re catching more Hispanic criminals.
Some have interpreted the fact that the percentage of deported immigrants with criminal records has increased over the past few years as a sign that illegals are committing more crime. But this effect is in large part due to Obama’s executive order to prioritize deporting immigrants with criminal histories.
Until better evidence is in, the notion that immigrants who cross the border without inspection in search of a better life are a disproportionately dangerous and felonious bunch is a potentially slanderous charge that conservatives should not toss around lightly.
