Table of Contents

Introduction
Immigrant Crime as an Exaggerated Fear: The Evidence
Immigrant Crime as an Underestimated Problem: Evidence and Practical Considerations
Federal Immigration Law Enforcement: Procedures and Complaints
Controlling Immigrant Crime: The Challenge Ahead
Bibliography

Introduction

In recent years it has become difficult to avoid perceiving immigrants, legal or not, as overwhelming this country with serious crime. The case of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, an illegal Mexican drifter, seems to have crystallized public fears. Ramirez, wanted in an FBI manhunt in the brutal murders of at least eight people near railroad tracks in Texas, Kentucky, and Illinois, surrendered himself to Texas Rangers at a border crossing near El Paso in July 1999. What especially aroused public ire was not just the magnitude of Ramirez’s crimes, but that he previously had been in federal custody. A check with the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Border Patrol computer identification files showed he was a repeat offender who reentered the U.S. after three deportations, and who voluntarily returned to Mexico at least nine times following apprehensions. In fact, four of the murders took place in the weeks following his release by the U.S. Border Patrol back to Mexico. Ramirez eventually pled guilty in Texas state court on multiple murder charges, and at his own request, received the death penalty. He currently is awaiting execution.

Tracking down dangerous criminals often meets with far less success. A 1998 Washington Post article revealed that District of Columbia police had been unable to resolve two dozen homicide cases because the suspects had fled to their native El Salvador to avoid prosecution. These cases represented nearly two-thirds of the department’s 37 outstanding warrants for slaying suspects.¹  A recent book by independent journalist Robert I. Friedman, meanwhile, revealed a network of ruthless Russian immigrants, based mainly in Brooklyn, N.Y., have built since the 1970s what amounts to a shadow world superpower. They are deeply involved on a global basis in such activities as prostitution, heroin smuggling, money-laundering, and stock fraud, and have committed dozens of murders against those persons — including fellow mobsters — getting in their way. Friedman had good reason to fear publishing his findings; numerous investigative journalists also have been murdered.²

Anecdotes, though numerous and damning, can explain only so much. Supporters of keeping U.S. immigration at high levels argue, with apparently convincing evidence, that immigrants as a whole are no more crime-prone than the native-born. Yet such an appraisal invites an age-old question: What’s wrong with this picture? How is that the foreign-born as a whole, according to several studies, represent no statistical anomaly, yet so much other evidence indicates they are responsible for a wave of individual and organized crime? The explanation, this report argues, is that much of the crime, a lot more than structured studies would suggest, isn’t being reported. For one thing, immigrants are victims of crimes committed by fellow immigrants (all the more likely to be hidden from view if the assailant is a family member or close relative), and are often too scared, bound by custom, or fearful of deportation. This tendency may be heightened by the insularity of certain immigrant cultures, especially where concentrated in low-income neighborhoods. Many foreign-born criminals either hide within our nation’s borders or operate outside of them. And the FBI’s crime figures reflect state and local crime reports, which often omit any mention of an offender’s national identity.

This report attempts to establish an understanding of the difficulties in identifying and combating crimes committed by immigrants. The purpose is not to create an "immigrant scare." Immigrants are crime victims as well as criminals. There is a long, ignominious tradition in this nation (not to mention others) of violence toward newcomers. In recent years more than ever immigrants who enter America illegally are at the mercy of unscrupulous and sadistic smugglers, and many die in boxcars or ships before arriving here. Others, in order to "work off" their debt to their smugglers, become slaves all but in name, and are subject to extortion, forced prostitution, and sweatshop jobs, often tricked by their ethnic compatriots into doing so.

But this reality should not undercut concern over the crimes immigrants commit. States with large immigrant populations, such as California and New York, have had to devote an enormous portion of their law enforcement and criminal justice budgets to investigating, apprehending, and incarcerating immigrants to ensure safety for the law-abiding. The federal government since the mid-1990s has stepped up funding of state and local efforts for this purpose. That many of the immigrants committing crimes entered here illegally (or overstayed their visas) adds fuel to the fire.³

Given that the flow of illegal immigration shows little or no sign of slowing, further federalization of crime control, for better or worse, appears to be a fixture on the long-term horizon. As such, proposals for reforming the Immigration and Naturalization Service may be at best of limited benefit. In the final analysis, the most effective way of controlling immigrant crime is to better enforce entry and visa time limits, alter the main basis for legal entry from family reunification to employment skills, and lower the overall immigration ceiling.
 

Immigrant Crime as an Exaggerated Fear: The Evidence

Immigrant Crime as a Stereotype

Immigrant crime, and widespread fear of it, has had a long history in this country. For well over a century newcomers have brought with them a criminal element who, however unrepresentative of their nationalities, have turned their communities into zones of lawlessness. Often, members of a particular ethnic group have preyed upon other groups, whether or not of the same nationality. Prior to the 1920s Jewish gangsters in New York frequently terrorized strikers into returning to work, and picked pockets on crowded streets. Italians operated extortion rings in San Francisco and prostitution houses in Chicago. Small grocery owners combined the legitimate and illegitimate by doubling as loan sharks, preying on the inability of immigrant workers to obtain credit through normal channels.⁴  Groups such as the Mafia, the Chinese Triads, and various Mexican and Central American drug cartels established control over the sale and distribution of goods and services, both legal and illegal.

Researchers and observers, aware that widespread concern over crime committed by immigrants can boil over into hate crimes committed against them, rarely hesitate to note that the majority of immigrants are law-abiding. Often, they go further, adding that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the native-born. A 1997 paper jointly sponsored by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Urban Institute typifies this view:⁵

Few stereotypes of immigrants are as enduring, or have been proven so categorically false over literally decades of research, as the notion that immigrants are disproportionately likely to engage in criminal activity…(If anything) immigrants are disproportionately unlikely to be criminal. 

It might surprise many just how many decades back this view dates.⁶  In 1901 a federal entity, known as the Industrial Commission, issued a "Special Report on General Statistics of Immigration and the Foreign-Born," observing that foreign-born whites were less oriented toward crime than native whites. A decade later, in 1911, another federal panel, the Immigration Commission, released its own study. "No satisfactory evidence," the report said, "has yet been produced to show that immigration has resulted in an increase in crime disproportionate to the increase in adult population…Such figures as are presented…indicate that immigration has not increased the volume of crime to a distinguishable extent, if at all…In fact, the figures seem to show a contrary result." During the Hoover years, yet another federal commission, the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, collected data on crime and arrest statistics in 52 cities. The results, the commission's 1931 report concluded, "seem to disagree radically with the popular belief that a high percentage [of crime] may be ascribed to the 'alien.' " Local data for Los Angeles in the early decades of the 20^th century also failed to show a pattern of immigrants committing excessive amounts of crime.⁷

Recent Research

In the 1980s and 1990s researchers have concluded, or at least have lent support to the conclusion, that immigrants commit proportionately no more than and possibly even fewer crimes than native-born citizens. The General Accounting Office, analyzing FBI records, found that foreign-born individuals accounted for about 19 percent of the total arrests in 1985 in six selected major cities.⁸  The foreign-born represented 19.6 percent of the aggregate population. While "foreign-born" can mean refer to citizens as well as aliens,⁹  the study makes an implicit case that immigrant crime is in line with the rest of the country.

Kristin Butcher of Boston College and Anne Morrison Piehl of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, using 1980 and 1990 Census Public Use Microdata Samples, found that among men aged 18-40 immigrants were less likely to be in correctional institutions than the native-born.¹⁰  If native-born men had the institutionalization rates of immigrants with the same demographic traits, the former's institutionalized population would be only two-thirds the current size. The authors added that immigrants who had arrived at an earlier point in time were more likely to be in prison than recent entrants. This stood in contrast to the prevailing view of labor economists that earlier immigrants were more successful, and hence less likely to see crime as a substitute for gainful employment.

Butcher and Piehl conducted a separate study of several dozen U.S. metropolitan areas.¹¹  Using data from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, the authors found recent immigrants had no significant effect either on crime rates or the change in rates over time. In a secondary analysis of individual data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, youths born abroad were significantly less likely than native-born youths to be criminally active.

John Hagan of the University of Toronto and Alberto Palloni of the University of Wisconsin also found a weak link between immigration and crime.¹²  Examining criminal justice data in two U.S. border cities, El Paso and San Diego, Hagan and Palloni argued immigrants are disproportionately represented among prison inmates because of biases in processes that lead from pre-trial detention to sentencing. The criminal justice system views immigrants as potential "flight risks," they noted, and thus detains many suspects who otherwise (as citizens) would not be detained. The authors concluded that incarceration rates, depending on the national origin of the criminal, exaggerate by anywhere from three to seven times the crime rates of immigrants relative to citizens.

INS data, recently made available at the request of the House and Senate Appropriations subcommittees that fund the agency's budget, show a lower recidivism rate for immigrants. Of the 35,318 criminal aliens INS released from custody (but not did not deport) during October 1994 and May 1999 there were 11,605 who went on to commit new crimes. This recidivism (repeat offender) rate of 37 percent was well below the 66 percent figure for the U.S. criminal population for the comparable period.¹³  This discrepancy did not dissuade Rep. Hal Rogers, R-Ky., and Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., the respective subcommittee chairmen, from pointing to the data as evidence of INS's incompetence and disregard for public safety; Rogers' response was particularly harsh. Yet neither refuted the existence of the gap in recidivism.

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End Notes

¹Avis Thomas-Lester, "Salvadoran Fugitives Frustrate Police," The Washington Post, July 18, 1998.

² Robert I. Friedman, Red Mafiya: How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America, Boston: Little, Brown, 2000.

³ It should be noted that about 95 percent of all non-citizens admitted to this country each year are not immigrants, but tourists, business persons, students, and other persons who do not arrive with the intent of living here. The term "immigrant" refers only to those persons who come to live here, but who are not (or not yet) citizens. It does not include immigrants who are naturalized citizens.

⁴ See John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America, Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1985, p. 132.

⁵ "Immigration and the Justice System," Research Perspectives on Migration, July/August 1997, Vol. 1, No. 5, Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the Urban Institute, p. 2.

⁶ For a discussion of these early studies, see ibid., pp. 4-5; also Michael Tonry, ed., Ethnicity, Crime and Immigration: Comparative and Cross-National Perspectives, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997, Introduction, pp. 20-21.

⁷ Cited in Thomas Muller, Immigrants and the American City, New York: New York University Press, 1993, p. 214.

⁸ U.S. General Accounting Office, Criminal Aliens: INS’ Enforcement Activities, GAO/GGD-88-3, November 10, 1987. The six cities in question were Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami and New York.

⁹ The Census Bureau estimated at the time that aliens represented about 50 percent of foreign-born Americans. See "Criminal Aliens: INS Enforcement," statement of Lowell Dodge, GAO Director of Administration of Justice Issues, before the House Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees and International Law, Washington, D.C.: U.S. General Accounting Office, November 1, 1989, p. 4.

¹⁰ Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, "Recent Immigrants: Unexpected Implications for Crime and Incarceration," Working Paper 6067, Cambridge, Mass.: National Bureau of Economic Research, June 1997. This study (same title) also appears in Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 51, No. 4, July 1998, pp. 654-79.

¹¹ Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, "Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship Between Immigration and Crime," Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Vol. 17, No. 3, 1998, pp. 457-93.

¹² John Hagan and Alberto Palloni, "Immigration and Crime in the United States," in The Immigration Debate: Studies on the Economic, Demographic, and Fiscal Effects of Immigration, James P. Smith and Barry Edmonston, eds., Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1998, pp. 367-87. Significantly, as border cities, El Paso and San Diego were less than representative of local criminal justice systems elsewhere in the U.S. This point is made in "Immigration and the Justice System," pp. 11-12.

¹³ The INS admitted that it was unable to perform estimates on the total number of crimes because the records of one-third of those released were not available through the FBI's criminal tracking system.

About the Author

Carl F. Horowitz is a Washington, D.C.-area policy consultant. Previously, he had been Washington correspondent with Investor's Business Daily, housing and urban affairs policy analyst with The Heritage Foundation, and assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. He has a Ph.D. in urban planning and policy development from Rutgers University.