Let Them In_ The Case for Open Borders - Jason L. Riley [67]
In 2005, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago published a study on immigrant incarceration rates. The authors, Kristin Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, found that “despite the widespread perception of a link between immigration and crime, immigrants have much lower institutionalization (incarceration) rates than the native born.” They also reported that more recently arrived immigrants have the lowest comparative incarceration rates, “and that their relative rates of institutionalization have fallen over the last three decades.” In 1980 the incarceration rate of foreign nationals was about one percentage point below natives; in 1990, it was a little more than one percentage point lower; and in 2000, it was almost three percentage points lower. Which means that talk of an immigrant “crime wave” was unsubstantiated by the facts thirty years ago, and it’s even less true today.
These findings are even more remarkable (and at odds with common perceptions) when you consider that immigration, both legal and illegal, has ballooned in recent decades, a point made by Rubén Rumbaut and Walter Ewing in a 2007 study of immigrant criminality for the Immigration Policy Center (IPC). “Even as the undocumented population has doubled to 12 million since 1994, the violent crime rate in the United States has declined by 34.2 percent and the property crime rate has fallen 26.4 percent,” write the authors. “Cities with large immigrant populations such as Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Miami also have experienced declining crime rates during this period.”
Nor is this a matter of law-abiding immigrant professionals from places like China, South Korea, India, and Taiwan compensating for a criminally inclined Latino immigrant underclass. Data from the census, the Justice Department, 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, ” write Rumbaut and Ewing. “This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented population.”
Males between eighteen and thirty-nine who haven’t completed high school comprise a majority of the U.S. prison population. They also represent a fair share of today’s Latino immigrants. Still, the IPC study found that the incarceration rate among natives in 2000 was five times higher than that of the foreign-born, 3.5 percent versus 0.7 percent. Native-born Latino men were almost seven times more likely to be incarcerated than Latino immigrants. Even white Anglos are imprisoned at higher rates than foreign-born white men.
Anti-immigrant activists point to a 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report and other studies estimating that around one-quarter of all federal prisoners in the United States are “criminal aliens.” What these activists omit is the size of the federal prison system. According to the Department of Justice, approximately 8 percent of the 2.2 million people behind bars in the United States at the end of 2005 were in federal prisons. The majority of inmates are in state prisons (57 percent) or local jails (34 percent). In other words, the GAO report estimates that immigrants comprise 25 percent of a prison system that holds 8 percent of the country’s inmates. It’s also important to note that