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HOUSTON – Tell me straight. Do you think crime by immigrants is getting out of control? Has local media been carrying those stories? Do you think it’s worse now than before? Do you think the police need more legal tools to get control?
If so, there’s something you should know.
Another lengthy academic study has just come out maintaining that immigrants are far less inclined to be bad guys than our native sons. It’s the natives who grow up to become criminals.
The researchers, Dr. Ruben Rumbaut of University of California at Irvine and Dr. Walter A. Ewing, of the Immigration Policy Center, which published the study, found that between 1994 and 2000 criminal incarceration rates among immigrants were amazingly low. In that period, as the U.S. undocumented population doubled to 12 million, violent crime declined 34.2 percent and property crime dropped 26.4 percent.
Crime was low in all major categories when comparing immigrants and the native population. Among men 18 to 39 years, who mainly comprise this country’s prison inhabitants. Immigrants from Mexico were eight times less likely to be incarcerated than their U.S. counterparts. Foreign-born Salvadorans and Guatemalans had a rate six times lower than their counterpart cousins.
In a startling observation, IPC director Benjamin Johnson admitted the report implied, “At some point in the political process, the facts don’t matter… (Immigration policy issues) become about sound bites and not about data.”
That is probably why the public will discount IPC’s “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation,” the study released Feb. 26.
For more than a century, reports like this one have been saying the same thing. The Industrial Commission of 1901, the (Dillingham) Immigration Commission of 1911, and the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement of 1931 all found lower levels of criminal involvement among the foreign-born. The historical record is consistent.
What does this report tell us that we didn’t already know? Nothing. The more intriguing issue is, why isn’t a large noisy part of the public willing to believe it?
The report’s authors dispassionately reason that because many immigrants enter the country by overstaying visas and through unauthorized channels, their status “is framed as an assault against the ‘rule of law.’”
Rumbaut says the erroneous popular myth of immigrant
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