Crime and Immigration

Having ranted about the cop beating immigrants in New York I decided to look into the true relationship between immigration and crime. The results I find are surprising.

See Stanford's The mythical tie between immigration and crime.

The study reveals that first-generation immigrants have not been more likely to be imprisoned than people born in the United States since 1880.

Today, immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than are U.S.-born individuals who are white, the study finds. And when the analysis is expanded to include Black Americans — whose prison rates are higher than the general population — the likelihood of an immigrant being incarcerated is 60 percent lower than of people born in the United States. 

They did find higher incarceration rates for Mexican and Latin American immigrants but tie the discrepancy to immigration related offenses. I wonder?

I decided to look for other studies and found much the same results.

The Myth of Immigrant Criminality - Immigration Policy Center

Undocumented Immigrants Are Half as Likely to Be Arrested for Violent Crimes as U.S.-Born Citizens - Scientific American

Does immigration really cause crime? - McGill University

I found several other concurring studies. The only outlier, as you might expect from a highly partisan think tank, is from the Heritage Foundation.

Increased Illegal Immigration Brings Increased Crime: Almost 2/3 of Federal Arrests Involve Noncitizens

Heritage appears to conflate what we consider "normal" crime with the illegal act of crossing the border, somewhat skewing the results. Cato, no left wing megaphone, also shows lower crime numbers for immigrants than the native born.

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I have mixed feelings about all of these studies, which average crime across these wide demographics. Because I know there are operational cartels of Latin Americans, they have uncovered them in home break in rings locally and in the business world I operate in. It is obvious that they are at work in New York City as well. The MS- 13 gang, which is comprised of members from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, is responsible for a wide array of violent crime, from Los Angeles to New York.

While a majority of crime might be home grown, I do believe that there is significant criminality extant by illegal immigrants, many from Latin America and to deny it is to bury your head in the sand.