The Immigration Debate Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration (1998) / Chapter Skim
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9 Immigration and Crime in the United States
9 Immigration and Crime in the United States
Pages 367-387
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From page 367... ...
The public and its politicians understandably are eager to find ways to reduce or shift this expense, while responding as well to concerns about public safety. One response involves efforts by states to shift expenses to the federal government by demanding compensation for the expense of incarcerating immigrants; another response is to press for the deportation of immigrants who are convicted of crimes; and a third response is to lobby for limitations on immigration and for stricter control of illegal immigration (see Cornelius et al., 1994~.
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From page 368... ...
These periods are sufficiently different and far apart in time that it is necessary to relearn and rethink much of what was once taken for granted about this topic. This task is made more difficult by the fact that, in between the last two periods of concern about immigration and crime, many criminal justice agencies stopped recording information about the presumed immigration and citizenship status of offenders.
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From page 369... ...
Special attention was directed toward southern and eastern Europeans during this time, although statistical analyses usually compared native-born whites with the foreign born more generally. Aside from highly questionable writings associated with the eugenics movement, the research of this earlier era provided little evidence of a causal association between immigration and cnme.
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From page 370... ...
Where causality was seen to operate, its direction often was in the opposite direction expected. A report by the United States Immigration Commission found higher crime rates among the children of native-born parents and among children of immigrants than among immigrants themselves (Park et al., 1925/1967~.
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From page 371... ...
. the older immigrant nationalities as well as the recent arrivals range in their rates of delinquency from the very highest to the lowest," nonetheless, "within the same type of social area, the foreign-born and the natives, recent immigrant nationalities, and older immigrants produce very similar rates of delinquency." These contrasting views emerging out of the early twentieth century American experience with immigration and crime are not necessarily contradictory, a point we return to later.
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From page 372... ...
Most police and court agencies do not systematically collect information on the citizenship and national origins of persons arrested and prosecuted, probably because it is now better recognized that the attributions involved would often be mistaken. Unfortunately, the pictures provided by prison statistics may also be distorted, not only by mistaken attributions of citizenship and national origin, but also because only a small proportion of criminal offenders ultimately are incarcerated and because bias may be introduced by the long sievelike process that leads to incarceration.
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From page 373... ...
The most systematic and comprehensive published data on the national origins of noncitizens in prisons are found in the 1991 Survey of State Prisons. Nearly half of the immigrants in state prisons (47%)
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From page 374... ...
These figures indicate that immigrants from Cuba and the Dominican Republic are incarcerated at rates between four and five times those of citizens, that immigrants from Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia are incarcerated at rates from two to two and onea half times those of citizens, and that immigrants from Guatemala and E1 Salva TABLE 9-1 Rates of Incarceration in U.S. State Prisons Per 1,000 Population Number of Persons State who entered U.S.Inmates State Imprisonment between 1980 and 1990in State Imprisonment Rate for Males National Origin (in thousands)
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From page 375... ...
the largest group of state prison inmates, even though their age-adjusted male state imprisonment rate is similar to that for citizens. This brings us back to a point made above, that if crime reduction is the sole and absolute priority, there is reason for concern.
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From page 376... ...
The 1991 Survey of State Prison Inmates reported that nearly half of all alien inmates were incarcerated for drug offenses, that about 40 percent of these alien inmates used drugs during the month prior to their arrest, and that about 20 percent were under the influence of drugs at the time of their current offense. The 1991 survey reports that very high proportions of alien inmates from Colombia (87 percent)
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From page 377... ...
drugs in the month before their current offense, and more than 30 percent of all inmates said that they had been under the influence of drugs at the time of their current offense. So although there may be a concentration in drug offenses among imprisoned Hispanic offenders, especially from Colombia and the Dominican Republic, levels of drug use among Hispanic offenders in general seem to be about the same or lower than in the broader population of inmates.
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From page 378... ...
The Commission found that the E1 Paso crime rate was perceived as escalating dramatically in recent years in spite of efforts of local law enforcement agencies. This escalating crime problem was seen as resulting from E1 Paso' s rapid urban growth, which in turn was fed by migration from Mexico, including a large illegal population.
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From page 379... ...
Thirteen of these SMSAs were not represented in the Uniform Crime Report data, so 34 SMSAs were ultimately available for our analysis. The three outcome measures of crime included violent crime rates, property crime rates, and total crime rates.
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From page 380... ...
In no case was the measure of percent illegal immigrants significantly correlated with any of the three outcome crime measures, and the noncitizen measure was significant in only one case. As a further test of potential influence, we created dummy variables, with the SMSAs in the highest quartile on each variable coded as a dummy variable in Poisson models of arrest counts.
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From page 381... ...
That is, young male illegal immigrants may be most likely to become involved in petty property crime as they attempt to satisfy basic subsistence needs while moving through the early stages of seeking, finding, losing, and regaining employment. Overall, we did not find consistent evidence in macro- or micro-level data that immigrants are much more likely than citizens of similar ages and gender to be involved in crime.
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From page 382... ...
The first involves the important task of making projections into the future that take into account interrelations among immigration, differential fertility, and social behavior. As we discuss in the Appendix to this chapter, higher rates of fertility among immigrant groups, either alone or in combination with other factors, such as criminal justice system bias, could result in immigrants forming larger proportions of prison populations in the future, even if their group propensities to crime remain constant.
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From page 383... ...
The following are several hypotheses that deserve further consideration when data and resources become available. Differential Fertility of Recent Immigrants Makes a Difference Assume for the sake of simplicity that the immigration flow is stopped now and that those who have already gained entrance into the United States continue to behave as they have so far, that is, that their propensity to become involved in criminal activities remains constant and roughly the same as that of citizens.
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From page 384... ...
If so, the overall crime rates will be affected hardly at all. As suggested above, however, if differential fertility persists for a generation or so, the result will be a higher contribution of first- and second-generation immigrants to the total pool of criminal activities and criminals apprehended.
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From page 385... ...
Information on propensity to criminal activity, changes in the propensity over time, and the venous risks associated with the unfolding of the judicial process could be obtained from surveys eliciting self-reported cnm~nal activity from venous ethnic or national groups and from time series of arrests and incarceration, where the latter also include information on national ongins. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We acknowledge the helpful assistance of Frank Bean, Jeffrey Passel, Patricia Parker, Elizabeth Anas, Handamala Rafalimanana, and Elaine Sieff.
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From page 386... ...
Pennell, Susan, Christine Curtis, and Jeff Tayman 1989 The Impact of Illegal Immigration on the Criminal Justice System. San Diego: San Diego Association of Governments.
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From page 387... ...
Anthony 1994 "Degree of acculturation and the risk of crack cocaine smoking among Hispanic Americans." American Journal of Public Health 84(11)
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