Immigration and Crime
Story summary:
CNN's Lou Dobbs repeatedly invokes the phrase "criminal illegal aliens," to feed the stereotype that illegal immigrants drive up crime. But a new study from the Public Policy Institute of California offers significantly more substance on the topic than anything you're likely to encounter on cable TV or in the presidential campaign. While immigrants (legal and illegal) account for 35 percent of California adults, they represent just 17 percent of the state's prisoners. This evidence suggests that immigrants have very low rates of criminal activity in California, something consistent with national studies on immigration and crime, which also find low rates of criminal activity for the foreign-born.
Immigration and Crime
Warming to one of his favorite themes the other night, CNN's Lou Dobbs repeatedly invoked the phrase "criminal illegal aliens," as he did his best to feed the stereotype that illegal immigrants drive up crime. Dobbs's relentless spleen on this subject, of course, has won him a following. Seal-the-borders nativism won't get anyone elected president - just ask ex-GOP candidates Tom Tancredo, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani - but there is no denying it's good for TV ratings.
Fortunately, politicians and television personalities aren't the only people interested in immigration and crime. A new study from the Public Policy Institute of California offers significantly more substance on the topic than anything you're likely to encounter on cable TV or in the presidential campaign.
The paper, by economists Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, assesses the impact of immigration on crime by analyzing data from California, which has by far the nation's largest population of prison inmates: One-eighth of all state prisoners in the United States are incarcerated in California, as are 30 percent of all inmates who are not American citizens. What Butcher and Piehl demonstrate is that immigrants, far from being more likely to end up behind bars, are dramatically less likely to do so.
The numbers are striking: While immigrants (legal and illegal) account for 35 percent of California adults, they represent just 17 percent of the state's prisoners. Men born in the United States are incarcerated in California prisons at more than two times the rate of foreign-born men. Within the age group most often involved in crime (ages 18 to 40), US natives - astonishingly - are 10 times more likely to be in prison or jail than immigrants (4.2 percent of the former are in correctional institutions, and just 0.42 percent of the latter). Even when the focus is narrowed to inmates who were born in Mexico and are not citizens - the demographic group most likely to include illegal immigrants - the rate of incarceration is only one-eighth that of men born in the United States.
