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Lucylastic -> Reports finds immigrants commit less crime than US-born citizens (3/20/2017 6:48:15 AM)
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Reports find that immigrants commit less crime than US-born citizens
Immigrants commit crimes and are incarcerated at a much lower rate than U.S. citizens, according to two separate studies released this week.
A study by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice research and advocacy group, found that "foreign-born residents of the United States commit crime less often than native-born citizens."
Another study, by the libertarian Cato Institute, compares incarceration rates by migratory status, ethnicity and gender.
"All immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives relative to their shares of the population," the Cato study reads.
On the campaign trail and as president, Donald Trump has portrayed illegal immigration as a dual risk: an economic threat and a source of increased crime.
Under President Trump's 2018 budget request, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) budget would grow by $3 billion to fund his proposed border wall and executive orders on immigration.
When he launched his presidential bid, Trump said that illegal immigrants “are bringing crime.” And in speeches, he frequently mentions individuals whose loved ones have been killed by illegal immigrants.
"It's all enforcement-only, following the rhetoric of Trump that he used in the campaign and continues to use, making immigrants at fault for everything, from crime to the economy," said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.).
But the two studies don’t point to immigrants posing more of a threat of crime than citizens born in the U.S.
Among people aged 18-54, 1.53 percent of natives are incarcerated, as are 0.85 percent of undocumented immigrants and 0.47 percent of documented immigrants, according to the Cato study of comparative incarceration rates.
The Cato study found that there are about 2 million U.S-born citizens, 123,000 undocumented immigrants and 64,000 documented foreign citizens in U.S. jails.
If natural-born citizens were incarcerated at the same rate as undocumented immigrants, "about 893,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated," read the study. Similarly, if native citizens were incarcerated at the same rate as documented immigrants, 1.4 million fewer would be in prison.
The Sentencing Project study even goes so far as to suggest that increased immigration "may have contributed to the historic drop in crime rates" since 1990.
While the study is "not definitive in proving causation," it links crime trends — 730 violent crimes per 100,000 citizens in 1990 compared to 362 per 100,000 in 2014 — and immigration trends in the same period. According to the study, there were 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country in 1990, and 11.1 million in 2014.
The reports can be found here
https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/immigration_brief-1.pdf
http://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Immigration-and-Public-Safety.pdf
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