Criminal immigrants?

• Author: Bailey, Ronald

Americans believe newcomers--legal and illegal--are more likely to commit crimes. Research suggests the opposite is true.

DO IMMIGRANTS commit more than their share of crimes? Most Americans think so. In a 2010 poll conducted for KSL-TV in Utah, 62 percent of respondents "definitely" or "probably" agreed that illegal immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime. Asked whether "more immigrants cause higher crime rates" in the National Opinion Research Center's 2000 General Social Survey, 25 percent of respondents said this was "very likely" and an additional 48 percent answered "somewhat likely." And a 2007 poll conducted on behalf of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice reported that 62 percent of Americans associate illegal immigration with higher crime rates.

The criminality of newcomers to America's shores is a sticking point in the immigration debate, one that anti-immigrant think tanks such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation for American Immigration Reform often return to. Just one problem: It's not real.

In fact, most research, such as a 2008 report by University of California sociologist Ruben Rumbaut for the Police Foundation National Conference, finds that immigrants, including undocumented ones, are less prone to crime than are native-born Americans. Rumbaut finds that the incarceration rate of American-born males between 18 and 39 years of age was five times the rate of foreign-born males, and finds similar conclusions in a survey of other studies on the topic.

A 2008 study by researchers at the Public Policy Institute of California found that "the foreign-born, who make up about 35 percent of the adult population in California, constitute only about 17 percent of the adult prison population." They further noted, "U.S.-born adult men are incarcerated at a rate over two-and-a-half times greater than that of foreign-born men." A 2010 report from the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice observed that, between 1991 and 2008, when an unprecedented 3.7 million foreign-born people--about a third of whom were "unauthorized" immigrants-- moved to California, the state's violent crime rate fell by 55 percent.

The national violent crime rate, according to data from the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, also has fallen by more than 70 percent since its peak in 1993 even as the number of immigrants, legal and undocumented, residing in the land of the free swelled from 20...