Illegals in U.S. are not more likely to be involved in crime

One of the more strongly voiced opinions in the immigration debate is that undocumented immigrants, or illegal aliens, spread crime when they come to the United States. Reliable statistics on crime by undocumented immigrants are hard to come by, but the Chicago Sun-Times’s Eric Herman reports that newspaper has learned that less than 4 percent of the adults in Illinois prisons have been identified as illegal immigrants, and that as of mid-July, less than 3 percent of the inmates in Cook County Jail were illegals. These incarceration figures nearly mirror the undocumented immigrant population. The United States has 11.5 million illegal immigrants, about 4 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Illinois has an illegal immigrant population of about 432,000 — just a bit more than 3 percent of the state’s population, according to a University of Illinois at Chicago study. that The figures show illegal aliens “are not over-represented [in jails], despite the conventional wisdom that they are much more involved in criminal activity,” said Ronald Weitzer, a criminologist at George Washington University. “Criminologists see it as something of a myth that immigrants are involved in more crime,” Weitzer said. “The public thinks that with higher immigration comes higher crime, but that just isn’t borne out by the data.”

Statistics, of course, do little to calm passions roiled whenever an illegal immigrant commits a high-profile crime, as was the case back in August when Jose Carranza, an illegal immigrant from Peru, was charged with the execution-style killings of three students in New Jersey. According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, about 1,700 of the approximately 45,000 adults now in Illinois prisons are illegal aliens. As of mid-July, the Cook County Jail had 255 illegals out of a jail population of 9,500, according to Sheriff Tom Dart’s office. These numbers could be incomplete because the figures are based on “detainer warrants” — and not every illegal immigrant in jail or prison has one. Immigrants also tend to under-report crime in their communities out of fear of the police, Weitzer said. The Cook County Jail figures also could be misleading, since not everyone in custody can be considered a criminal — some have been charged with crimes but not convicted.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can deport someone here illegally whether they’ve committed a crime or not. DHS estimated 302,500 criminal illegal aliens would be locked up in state and local jails throughout the United States in fiscal year 2007. The lack of hard data leaves both sides of the debate free to make assertions. Thus, Tim Bueler, media adviser to the Minuteman Project, an anti-immigration group, claims that claims, without offering specific proof, that since 9/11, more than 64,000 Amercian citizens were killed by illegal aliens. Sioban Albiol, who teaches immigration law at DePaul University, challenges this claim, saying that “the statistics and the facts don’t support” the claim that illegals commit a disproportionate amount of crime. Ruben Rumbaut, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine, wrote in a recent study that “immigrants have the lowest rates of imprisonment for criminal convictions in American society.” He offers this observation, though: Arrests and incarceration increase when it comes to immigrants’ American-born children, Rumbaut noted. Immigrants, Rumbaut told the Sun-Times, “don’t have time to mess around. But their U.S.-born children have time to pick up a lot of bad habits of American society.”