Ascribing “criminality” to immigrants defies the factual record, distorts U.S. policy

Immigrants are less likely than the native-born to be behind bars:

• According to an original analysis of data from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the authors of this report, roughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males age 18-39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born. This disparity in incarceration rates has existed for decades, as evidenced by data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses. In each of those years, the incarceration rates of the native-born were anywhere from two to five times higher than that of immigrants.
• The 2010 Census data reveals that incarceration rates among the young, less-educated Mexican, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan men who make up the bulk of the unauthorized population are significantly lower than the incarceration rate among native-born young men without a high-school diploma. In 2010, less-educated native-born men age 18-39 had an incarceration rate of 10.7 percent — more than triple the 2.8 percent rate among foreign-born Mexican men, and five times greater than the 1.7 percent rate among foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men.

Immigrants are less likely than the native-born to engage in criminal behavior:

• A variety of different studies using different methodologies have found that immigrants are less likely than the native-born to engage in either violent or nonviolent “antisocial” behaviors; that immigrants are less likely than the native-born to be repeat offenders among “high risk” adolescents; and that immigrant youth who were students in U.S. middle and high schools in the mid-1990s and are now young adults have among the lowest delinquency rates of all young people.

Criminalizing immigration and expanding the apparatus of enforcement
The report says that despite the compelling evidence that immigration is not linked to higher crime rates, and that immigrants are less likely to be criminals than the native-born, many U.S. policymakers succumb to their fears and prejudices about what they imagine immigrants to be. As a result, far too many immigration policies are drafted on the basis of stereotypes rather than substance. These laws are criminalizing an ever broadening swath of the immigrant population by applying a double standard when it comes to the consequences for criminal behavior. Immigrants who experience even the slightest brush with the criminal justice system, such as being convicted of a misdemeanor, can find themselves subject to detention for an undetermined period, after which they are expelled from the country and barred from returning. “In other words, for years the government has been redefining what it means to be a ‘criminal alien,’ using increasingly stringent definitions and standards of ‘criminality’ that do not apply to U.S. citizens,” the reports says.

These increasingly punitive laws are only as effective as the immigration-enforcement apparatus designed to support them — and this apparatus has expanded significantly over the past three decades. More and more immigrants have been ensnared by enforcement mechanisms new and old, from worksite raids to Secure Communities. Detained immigrants are then housed in a growing nationwide network of private, for-profit prisons before they are deported from the United States. “In short, as U.S. immigration laws create more and more ‘criminal aliens,’ the machinery of detention and deportation grows larger as well, casting a widening dragnet over the nation’s foreign-born population in search of anyone who might be deportable,” the report says.

With the technologically sophisticated enforcement systems in place today, being stopped by a police officer for driving a car with a broken tail light can culminate in a one-way trip out of the country if the driver long ago pled guilty to a misdemeanor that has since been defined as a deportable offense.

The scale of the federal government’s drive to criminalize immigration and expand the reach of the enforcement dragnet becomes apparent when the proliferation of immigration laws, policies, and enforcement mechanisms is tracked over the past three decades. The report notes that two bills passed by Congress in 1996 stand as the most flagrant modern examples of laws which create a system of justice for non-U.S. citizens that is distinct from the system which applies to citizens.

“From old-fashioned worksite raids to the modern databases which are the heart of initiatives such as Secure Communities and the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), the government’s immigration-enforcement mechanisms continue to expand and reach deeper and deeper into the immigrant community. In the process, basic principles of fairness and equal treatment under the law are frequently left by the wayside,” the report says.

The “Great Expulsion”
The United States, the report continues, is in the midst of a “great expulsion” of immigrants, both lawfully present and unauthorized, who tend to be non-violent and non-threatening and who often have deep roots in this country. This campaign of deportation is frequently justified as a war against “illegality” — which is to say, against unauthorized immigrants. That justification, however, does not come close to explaining the banishment from the United States of lawful permanent residents who committed traffic offenses and who have U.S.-based families. Nor does it explain the lack of due-process rights accorded to so many of the immigrants ensnared in deportation proceedings.

Likewise, “the wave of deportations we are currently witnessing is often portrayed as a crime-fighting tool. But, as the findings of this report make clear, the majority of deportations carried out in the United States each year do not actually target ‘criminals’ in any meaningful sense of the word,” the report notes.

The report concludes:

There are many signs that the U.S. immigration-enforcement system has run amok. Deportations during the Obama Administration have exceeded the two-million mark. Families and communities have been and are being needlessly torn apart in the process. And each year, billions upon billions of dollars are spent on border and interior enforcement, while hundreds of migrants die in the deserts and mountains of the southwest trying to cross into the country from Mexico — sometimes while trying to reach their families in the United States. These are tragedies that could be prevented — if only Congress would choose to inject proportionality, discretion, and a little humanity back into the immigration system.
….

Public policies must be based on facts, not anecdotes or emotions. And the fact is that the vast majority of immigrants are not “criminals” in any meaningful sense of the word. The bulk of the immigration-enforcement apparatus in this country is not devoted to capturing the “worst of the worst” foreign-born criminals. Rather, as Secure Communities exemplifies all too well, the detention-and-deportation machine is designed primarily to track down and expel non-violent individuals, including legal residents of the United States who have worked and raised families here for many years. This brand of immigration policy is cruel, pointless, shortsighted, and counterproductive. And it is not an effective substitute for immigration reform which makes our immigration system responsive to the economic and social forces which drive migration in the first place.
….

Policymakers who look at the entire foreign-born population of the United States through a law-enforcement lens are seeing things that aren’t really there. As renowned psychologist Abraham H. Maslow wrote many years ago, “it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” The blunt weapon that is the U.S. immigration-enforcement apparatus is being wielded against a widening swath of the immigrant community, regardless of their ties to this country, regardless of whether or not they are actually criminals. It is long past time for U.S. immigration policies to accurately reflect the diversity and complexity of immigration to this country, based not on a reflexive politics of fear and myth, but on sound analysis and empirical evidence.

— Read more in Walter A. Ewing et al., The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States (American Immigration Council, July 2015)