WASHINGTON (May 2001) — Immigration has often been linked to crime in the public mind, helped along by sensational incidents like the arrival of Cuban felons in the 1980 Mariel Boatlift or the railroad murders committed by Mexican illegal alien Rafael Resendez-Ramirez. Researchers, fearing the dangerous potential of such stereotypes, have gone to great lengths to dispute any correlation between crime and immigration, pointing to statistics that seem to show immigrants no more likely than natives to be involved in crime.

However laudable such motivations may be, they limit objective inquiry into the crime trends within immigrant communities that harm immigrants as well as natives. A new Center for Immigration Studies report, An Examination of U.S. Immigration Policy and Serious Crime, by Carl Horowitz, takes a hard look at this issue, and concludes that crime involving immigrants is significantly underreported. Among the reasons for this underreporting:

• Certain immigrant cultures view family crime as a "family matter," and hence not something that ought to concern police.
   

• Many victims are fearful, however mistakenly, that contacting local police could result in deportation.
   

• Foreign-born criminals are well connected to crime rings abroad, which help them escape detention.

What's more, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the lead agency in detaining and deporting criminal aliens, has not been able to keep up. This has happened, despite increased resources, for a variety of reasons, including:

• The workload of the INS has been increasing very rapidly
   

• Foreign government often impede U.S. criminal deportations
   

• Because of pressure from advocates of high immigration, the INS now seldom denies citizenship on the grounds that lying about one's criminal record is a demonstration of poor moral character

Among possible solutions, reorganization of the INS enforcement functions is not likely to have much effect. More likely to have an impact would be a reorientation of immigrant selection criteria away from family categories, which are more likely to admit those with few skills and little education. But even placing more emphasis on employment skills will be inadequate so long as legal immigration, and the illegal immigration that inevitably follows in its wake, remain at today's high levels.