The Myth of Immigrant Criminality

[cato2]

This is a lengthy piece consisting of 20 pages of research, the bibliography alone contains two pages of research material. You might also want to look at the charts within this report, they are from the Census Bureau. The resource page lists some of the reports used from the Department of Justice. Since this report is 20 pages long I have only copied the first page and the link will take you to the main article which is in a PDF format.

The Myth of Immigrant Criminality
and the Paradox of Assimilation:
Incarceration Rates Among Native And Foreign-born Men
by Rubén G. Rumbaut, Ph.D.
and Walter A. Ewing, Ph.D.


Because many immigrants to the United States, especially Mexicans and Central Americans, are young men who arrive with very low levels of formal education, popular stereotypes tend to associate them with higher rates of crime and incarceration. The fact that many of these immigrants enter the country through unauthorized channels or overstay their visas often is framed as an assault against the “rule of law,” thereby reinforcing the impression that immigration and criminality are linked. This association has flourished in a post-9/11 climate of fear and ignorance where terrorism
and undocumented immigration often are mentioned in the same breath.

But anecdotal impression cannot substitute for scientific evidence. In fact, data from the census and other sources show that for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants, even those who are the least educated. This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented population. What is more, these patterns have been observed consistently over the last three decennial censuses, a period that spans the current era of mass immigration, and recall similar national-level fi ndings reported by three major government commissions during the fi rst three decades of the 20th century. The problem of crime in the United States is not “caused” or even aggravated by immigrants, regardless of their legal status. But the misperception that the opposite is true persists among policymakers, the media, and the general public, thereby undermining the development of reasoned public responses to both crime and immigration. Among the findings in this report:

Crime Rates Have Declined as Immigration Has Increased

Even as the undocumented population has doubled to 12 million since 1994, the violent crime rate in the United States has declined 34.2 percent and the property crime rate has fallen 26.4 percent.

Cities with large immigrant populations such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami also have experienced declining crime rates during this period.

Immigrants Have Lower Incarceration Rates than Natives

Among men age 18-39 (who comprise the vast majority of the prison population), the 3.5 percent incarceration rate of the native-born in 2000 was 5 times higher than the 0.7 percent incarceration rate of the foreign-born.

The foreign-born incarceration rate in 2000 was nearly two-and-a-half times less than the 1.7 percent rate for nativeborn non-Hispanic white men and almost 17 times less than the 11.6 percent rate for native-born black men.

Native-born Hispanic men were nearly 7 times more likely to be in prison than foreign-born Hispanic men in 2000, while the incarceration rate of native-born non- Hispanic white men was almost 3 times higher than that of foreign-born white men.

Foreign-born Mexicans had an incarceration rate of only 0.7 percent in 2000—more than 8 times lower than the 5.9 percent rate of native-born males of Mexican descent. Foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men had an incarceration rate of 0.5 percent, compared to 3.0 percent of native-born males of Salvadoran and Guatemalan descent.

http://www.ailf.org/ipc/special_report/sr_022107.pdf

Immigration Policy Center

A division of the American Immigration Law Foundation

A valid argument is made concerning their immigration status, they have entered this country illegally. While they have broken the law crossing over into this country, the report shows that they have very low crime rates when compared to other groups. And the reason I posted this to begin with is that I read this article from the World Net Daily, a paper published by Joseph Farah co-founded the Western Journalism Center, known for its promotion of conservative causes. WorldNetDaily is a for-profit website that provides primarily conservative-oriented news and editorials, as well as publishing letters to the editor and maintaining forums and a daily poll. Besides providing articles authored by its own staff, the site links to news from other publications. The website features editorials from the site's founder, Joseph Farah and other conservative authors such as Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, and David Limbaugh.

WorldNetDaily: Illegal aliens linked to gang-rape wave