Undocumented Immigrants and Crime: The Real Facts
Statistics show that crime rates in the United States are slowly falling after President Trump’s 2017 Inauguration. In his inauguration address, The President said that stringent measures were going to be taken against all kinds of crimes, particularly violent crimes. From the stated statistics, it is evident that Trump’s administration is taking the right steps in addressing crime. However, the numbers are still high, and the commonly held perception is that there is a close connection between undocumented immigrants and crime in the US. As an undocumented immigrant charged with a crime, you might need the help of a Criminal Attorney in understanding the real facts and defense against any criminal charges you might be facing today.
Are You an Undocumented Immigrant?
The simplest of all definitions of undocumented immigrants will be people who are foreign-born but do not have legal rights to be living in the US. Some people call them illegal immigrants, though that is not an official term but a popular jargon that does not feature anywhere in the country’s immigration laws. A better alternative is the term unauthorized or undocumented immigrant.
In approximation, the Homeland Security Department of the United States, as well as the Pew Research Center, has placed the total of undocumented immigrants as 11-12 million, which is below four percent of the total US population. Some of these immigrants are those that have sneaked their way across the US border, but others legally entered the US, maybe as tourists or with a temporary Visa, then they failed to leave.
The law calls for the deportation of unauthorized immigrants, but this has not been an easy thing to achieve. This is partly because the country has limited enforcement resources, which makes it hard for them to stay up to date with the increasing numbers of undocumented immigrants. A report that was released in 2011 by a director of The Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed that it could cost the country an average amount of $12,500 to remove each undocumented immigrant living in the US soil. Since then, the costs may have risen significantly.
What’s the Problem with Undocumented Immigrants?
Trump’s administration has a zero-tolerance policy on illegal immigration. Under this policy, all undocumented immigrants are supposed to be indicted and imprisoned, an exercise that is predicted to cost about $200 per adult every day for an average stay of six weeks. The main reason behind this is because of the firm belief that there is a close connection between unauthorized immigrants and crime in the country.
This is a widely held notion, although much research has been conducted already to show that there is no connection between immigration and the rise of crime in the US.
However, where did this perception originate?
The first year of immigration policy by President Trump’s administration relied heavily on claims that immigrants brought crime into the US. The president’s targets at that time were the sanctuary cities. In a statement he made, the president claimed sanctuary cities were releasing undocumented immigrants every day into our communities. The immigrants, according to his account, comprised of traffickers, drug dealers, and gang members. The president believes that these sanctuary cities were safe havens for criminals.
For a very long time, the immigration rate has been growing quite fast in the United States, just the same way as crime, particularly violent crime. However, much research has been conducted, and it has been established that there is no causal connection between immigration and crime rates in the country.
Findings from the Marshall Project
A research project was conducted by a sociologist at The State University of New York, in collaboration with four universities. The research was intended to compare crime rates for over 200 metropolitan areas and immigration rates over the last several years. The study was conducted on selected cities such as New York, a big urban hub and Muncie, Indiana, a small manufacturing center. The selected areas were dispatched geographically throughout the country.
Data gathered from that study showed that there are more immigrants in the country today than there were in the 1980s, but there are fewer crimes today than there were then. The Marshall Project, whose data was collected up to 2016, showed that crime rates have significantly fallen across the country, even as immigrants flock various parts of the country.
Even as many people continue to argue that unauthorized immigrants have increased crime rates in the United States, the study clearly shows that immigration does not influence crime in any way. In general, the collected data either indicates that immigration has the potential to reduce crime rates in the country, or there is no connection between immigration and crime.
Now, the focus has shifted from immigrants in general to unauthorized immigrants as the reason why the crime rate is still high in the country.
Statistical Facts from CNN about Illegal Immigration and Crime
The very first formal address that President Trump made to the nation from his Oval Office implied that the country was facing a national threat as well as a humanitarian crisis from the US-Mexico border. Since then, so many researchers have come up to argue against that statement, saying that migrants have lower chances of committing crimes in the US. From those researches’ findings, here are some of the critical statistics that paint the real picture:
Pew Research Center has estimated that the total number of undocumented immigrants in the US is 10.7 million. This is about four percent of the entire US population. From those, 105,140 is the total number of migrants that were arrested and convicted as criminals by ICE in the year 2018. In its statement, ICE said that it is committed to the targeting and removal of criminal immigrants from the US. Advocates do not agree with this though, saying that ICE has inflated the statistics about undocumented immigrants and has included minor offenses like traffic misdemeanors in its calculation.
The newest prison population report from The Bureau of Justice Statistics show that there is an estimate of 83,573 inmates in both federal and state prisons across the US, who are not citizens of the United States. This number is below six percent of the entire prison population. That report, however, indicated that the total number of prisoners who are non-citizens could be higher because some states might have provided an unreliable number and other states have not provided any information at all.
Administrative officials, on the other hand, have reported that at least one in every five convicts in federal prisons is a non-citizen. Again, their report indicates that most of those inmates are those who have been living in the US illegally. Administrative officials say that such statistics are proof enough to show the danger the country is in from illegal immigration. The United States’ AG, Jeff Sessions, alleged in a statement early this year that there should be no crime rate for unauthorized immigrants in the country. He goes on to say that every crime an unauthorized immigrant commits in the US is a crime that could have been stopped.
As usual, advocates have not taken this report by administration officials lightly, saying that most undocumented immigrants in state prisons are facing offenses that only them could suffer, such as entering the country illegally, living here without documents and illegally re-entering the country after removal.
In Texas, statistics show that there are about 719 criminal convictions for every 100,000 immigrants. This number was obtained from the study conducted by the Cato Institute in 2015 and was geared towards comparing crime rates among natives and immigrants in Texas. From the study, it was established that criminal arrests and convictions for immigrants in the state were way lower than those of natives.
Another study, conducted by an economist from The Crime Prevention Research Center showed that 142% of undocumented immigrants were likely to be arrested and convicted of criminal offenses as compared to residents of Arizona. The study was conducted on data obtained in that state and was referred to by several politicians, organizations, and the Justice Department when the debate of restricting immigration came. This study has, however, been highly criticized by researchers, including the Cato Institute, who argued that the obtained data was misinterpreted.
Finally, there is the infamous publication in The Criminology Journal. Where a research article showed that the increase in illegal immigration in different states could be associated with a significant decrease in the occurrence of violence in those states, similarly, a data analysis obtained between 1990 and 2014 data suggests that undocumented immigration within these years could be associated with the decreasing rate of violent crimes. The authors have, however, indicated that more studies need to be conducted before a conclusion is made.
Since the authors were merely using the state’s official crime data, there could be other ways of interpreting the obtained data as said by the sociology professor, while releasing their study findings from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Verdict
It is not easy to collect data on undocumented immigrants to prepare a final report on the relationship between them and crime rates in the United States. However, from the statistics provided; it is clear that there is no relationship between the two: immigration and crime. For anyone facing criminal injustice for the mere fact that they are undocumented immigrants, a Criminal Attorney could help understand the real facts as well as help you come up with a proper defense against the accusations.