Who is more often involved in crime - illegal immigrants or US citizens - ForumDaily
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Who is more often involved in crime - illegal immigrants or US citizens

According to a first-of-its-kind analysis of Texas arrest and conviction records, the crime rate among illegal immigrants is only a fraction of that of US citizens. The details were shared by the edition News Wisc.

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Compared to illegal immigrants, U.S. citizens were twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes in Texas from 2012 to 2018, two and a half times more likely to be arrested for violent drug-related crimes, and more than four times more likely to have been arrested for criminal offenses. The study was conducted by analysts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

With new access to the computerized Texas crime history of more than 1,8 million arrests in six years, UW-Madison sociology professor Michael Light and co-authors Jingying He and Jason Roby, both graduate students of UW-Madison, were able to directly calculate the percentage of US citizens, legal immigrants and illegal immigrants have been arrested for a number of serious crimes.

Previous studies have drawn similar, albeit less direct, findings. These studies were limited to comparing crime rate trends with immigration trends, as there were no crime data comparing crime to the immigration status of offenders.

“It's like asking if crime goes up when unemployment goes up. That's not the same as asking whether unemployed people commit more crimes, says Light, who led the new study. “These are related issues, but not the same.”

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Part of the reason Texas maintains such a detailed record of offenders is the federal government's Community Safety Program, which provides information on immigration status and is marketed as a way to deport criminals before they can commit new crimes in the United States.

Although illegal immigrants are a top priority for federal law enforcement, they are much more likely to clash with local law enforcement than with federal agents. Through Secure Communities, when local police register arrested suspects, their biometrics are compared with federal databases, which sends an arrest notification to USCIS.

But at least two independent studies show Secure Communities had no impact on crime rates, despite deporting more than 200 people in its first four years.

“If the plan was to make communities safer, to reduce the likelihood of, say, a violent attack in those communities through deportation, that didn't happen,” Light says. “Our results help us understand why this is so. The deported people simply did not pose a particular criminal threat.”

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While new research cannot explain why illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes, the general finding is that first-generation immigrants tend to be less likely to crime, and illegal immigrants are almost always first-generation immigrants. Light believes there are many reasons to expect a decline in crime among illegal immigrants.

“They have a huge incentive to avoid criminal acts. The biggest fear among immigrants is legal problems that could lead to deportation,” Light says.

Another important factor may be that immigration, especially illegal entry into the United States, is not easy.

“There are a lot of opportunities for crime in Mexico, Venezuela and other places where people immigrate,” Light says. “The argument is that many people who want to immigrate are looking for goals, looking for economic opportunity, and those things don't correlate very strongly with criminal propensity.”

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The researchers repeated their analysis of crime rates with minor changes to the data—using convictions instead of arrests.

In each case, there was a much lower crime rate among illegal immigrants, which, according to Light, should be useful in developing immigration policy.

“The conversation about illegal immigration needs to be based on the best empirical data,” he says. “If someone says that we know that illegal immigrants increase the crime rate, then there is a lot of evidence against such a statement.”

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