Research Doesn’t Back a Link Between Migrants and Crime in U.S.
As Donald Trump exemplifies, politicians frequently have blamed immigrants for crime. At various times, much-publicized criminal acts, such as the killing in San Francisco last summer by an immigrant unlawfully in the United States and the recent alleged sex crimes in Cologne, Germany, have provoked great public concern.
Rick Gladstone in the New York Times reminds us that the data does not support the claim that immigrants are more crime-prone than U.S. citizens. Indeed, statistical studies show that in the United States immigrants are far more law-abiding than natives, regardless of race, class or education.
Walter A. Ewing, a senior researcher at the American Immigration Council, collaborated with Rubén G. Rumbaut (University of California, Irvine), and Daniel E. Martinez (George Washington University), on a study released this past July that used Census, FBI, and other data to rebut stereotypes about immigrants. It showed that between 1990 and 2013, as the foreign-born share of the United States population nearly doubled and the number of unauthorized immigrants more than tripled, violent crime declined 48 percent and property crime fell 41 percent. The study also showed that incarceration rates of native-born Americans were far higher than of migrants. Such findings reiterated what other research had confirmed for more than a century.
KJ