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The Meta-Issue: The Veil of Secrecy Immigration enthusiasts might be prone to use such research as evidence that widespread fear of immigrant crime is an irrational, if understandable, response to sensationalized anecdotes.14 But such a view may be hasty in its own right. Many immigrant crimes are not reported, and possibly in greater proportion than the crimes that the U.S.-born commit. Many victims of immigrant criminals fear reporting crimes to the police because their victimizers are of the same nationality, and thus are more likely to retaliate in ways that would dissuade the victim from calling police. This is especially true with immigrant crime rings. As illegal economic activity, organized crime requires an unusually high level of trust to maintain a veil of secrecy from police and mob rivals alike. A common language and experience, apart from the larger American one, can link such people. "Criminals," writes immigration critic Peter Brimelow, "prefer to deal with co-conspirators they understand and trust — in economist-speak, it reduces their transaction costs. And such tightly-knit groups, operating in a foreign and sometimes obscure language, are notoriously difficult for the police to penetrate."15 This is why for many decades newcomer ethnic groups from all parts of the world, in varying types and locations, each have set up their own versions of the Mafia. These organizations could be seen, at least initially, as ethnic protection societies, providing members with jobs, housing, and other necessities. But their dominance in exerting informal social and economic control over immigrants enabled leaders to successfully coerce business rivals and community members. A special report released in 1990, based on the Justice Department's National Crime Victimization Survey, which annually samples about 100,000 persons aged 12 and over in roughly 50,000 U.S. households, suggests underreporting among Hispanics, the nation's largest ethnic grouping, occurs often and more so than among non-Hispanics. While it is true "Hispanics" is a far from perfect proxy for "immigrants," not the least of the reasons being that many Hispanics are native-born, the data show significant differences. During the period 1979-86 Hispanics failed to report crimes of all types at a rate nearly twice the rate that they did report; even for violent crimes alone the unreported offenses outnumbered the reported ones. The violent crime victimization rate for Hispanics also exceeded that for non-Hispanics, 39.6 versus 35.3 offenses per 1,000 households, with household crime (burglary, larceny, vehicle theft) showing the greatest discrepancy, 265.6 versus 204.5 crimes per 1,000 households.16 Police confirm the tendency to underreport. In Memphis, Police Sgt. L. A. Currin estimates that because Hispanic immigrants are reluctant to come forward, hundreds of robberies each year go unreported. "They don't think they have certain rights," said Currin. "We are not Immigration [and Naturalization Service]. Our concern is whether a crime was committed."17 Often, robbers, believing immigrants are in the U.S. illegally, assume they don't have bank accounts and thus carry around a lot of cash. Thus, it is not simply group cultural norms, but also fear of government reprisal, that drives underreporting. Though an increasing number of urban police departments, including Memphis's, have begun outreach services to Hispanic, Asian, and other immigrant communities and have hired more bilingual officers, this fear remains alive and well. "A Family Matter" An especially ominous reason for underreporting is that what most Americans would call crime many immigrants consider to be tradition, or if a crime, a "family matter" not requiring outside interference. In this view, police are not supposed to supplant patriarchal authority in resolving disputes, however evident that the "conflict" in question is a case of prey needing protection from predator. Sometimes this can have tragic consequences. In Washington, D.C., for example, a Vietnamese family failed to report to authorities the repeated sexual molestation of their child by another adult member of their community. The family only complained after the predator murdered the child. When police, through an interpreter, asked the parents why they did not report the sexual abuse, they replied it is customary in their culture not to call upon strangers to settle delicate family problems.18 A young woman from Singapore recalled at a 1999 conference on domestic violence in Boston that back in her native country no one — not family members or neighbors — ever questioned her parents' and uncle's use of beatings and rape as a way to discipline her, an aunt, and a grandfather: "We rallied not for the victim but for the batterer. We'd say, Yeah, hit her because she was disobedient." That comment came in the context of a report by the Massachusetts Governor's Commission on Domestic Violence that found the state's outreach efforts on domestic violence hadn't reached refugees and immigrants, who have a greater incidence of family violence.19 In a bitterly ironic note, a Nigerian woman who investigated child abuse complaints for the City of New York was arrested in 1999 along with her husband and charged with forcing a Nigerian girl into servitude for nine years. Federal investigators also noted the couple and several relatives had forced two other Nigerian girls into servitude. In the first instance, the couple had lured a 14-year-old girl into coming to the U.S. to attend trade school and become a seamstress. Shortly thereafter, they terrorized her into working as a maid and a babysitter in their house. The couple seized the girl's passport, forbade her to speak to anyone outside the family, barred her from using the phone, threatened to deport her and harm her family, and beat her when she disobeyed orders. At age 22, while being beaten for requesting her freedom, neighbors overheard her screams and called the police; an anonymous tip led the FBI into the picture later on. The couple at their arraignment in federal court denied mistreating the girl.20 Cases such as these are far more common than imagined. Each year, according to a 1999 report by the Central Intelligence Agency, between 45,000 and 50,000 women and children are trafficked as slaves into the United States from Asia, Europe, Latin America, India, and Africa.21 One might ask: Why don't immigrant victims report these crimes? How could they tolerate serving as slaves all but in name? Aside from the extensively diagnosed general tendency of victims to blame themselves for violence inflicted upon them,22 immigrants in particular often have a difficult time shaking the perception that local police are connected to immigration authorities. A young Mexican woman named Maria, for example, moved to the Dallas area in 1992 and the next year met the man who would become her husband. He routinely abused her, but she was reluctant to call police because she feared deportation; the husband was a legal U.S. resident, and Maria was not. The final straw was when her husband used electrical cables to shock her, then locked her and their daughter in his workshop. She broke through the back door, took her daughter and fled to a women's shelter.23 Another Mexican woman in El Paso, whose first name was Laura, was beaten repeatedly for four years by her husband until her arms and legs were black and blue. At one point, her husband pointed a gun at her and told her if she ever left him, he'd keep their young twins, and have her deported. Finally, she came to a shelter. As with the case of Maria, Laura did not have permanent legal resident status, but her husband did.24 "Many of these women had poor experiences with the police in their own countries," noted a Dallas police sergeant with the domestic crimes unit. "They equate us with the INS. That I don't like. We're not Immigration, and their [immigration] status is of no relevance to whether we will help them."25 The fear women in situations like these feel is made worse given their lack of money when they leave (more accurately, flee) their husbands; without money, an attorney may be the furthest thing from their minds. Safe Harbors Outside the U.S. If immigrant crime victims are reluctant to come forward to police, immigrant criminals often know how to make themselves scarce, and not necessarily by remaining or even operating within the U.S. A large portion of ethnic crime in this country can be linked to international networks. "Hundreds of thousands of people are being moved globally by highly organized criminal enterprises operating on all continents," noted Robert Perito, director of the State Department's Office of International Criminal Justice a few years ago. "Their primary target is the United States."26 It would seem many of these criminals are hitting the mark. That slavery has been illegal in this country for almost a century and a half has not deterred certain immigrant groups from reintroducing it. A few years ago a Mexican immigrant couple was arrested for enslaving a large number of their deaf countrymen in a ring with operations in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Arizona, North Carolina, and South Carolina.27 The Chinese operate what observers are calling a "new slave trade" in the U.S.28 Among certain nationalities fraud is woven into the economic culture. Telephone fraud has run rampant among some immigrant groups; one estimate several years ago put the cost of long-distance scams to U.S. phone companies and customers nearly $2 billion a year.29 One Secret Service agent characterized the problem of credit-card fraud among Nigerians as "absolutely epidemic." U.S. officials started keeping records in this area by ethnic group in 1989; by a half-decade later, they had arrested more than 1,000 Nigerians.30 A new kind of credit card scam, involving hand-held "skimmers," is an up-and-coming practice among immigrant theft rings. The crook, often a restaurant waiter, swipes a credit card through the skimmer, usually disguised as a pager or worn inside a jacket, and stores data embedded inside the magnetic security stripe. It is possible to transmit hundreds of stolen card numbers via e-mail to card cloning mills run by Latin American, Asian, Russian, and Nigerian crime syndicates. Consumers have to go through an involved process to get unauthorized charges removed, while card issuers pass along the costs anyway in the form of higher interest rates and fees. "It's not unusual," noted Gregory Regan, head of the Secret Service's financial-crimes division, "to see a card compromised in New York City or Washington and the numbers used overseas, in Taiwan, Japan or Europe, within 24 to 48 hours."31 To an extent, crime rings are based somewhere else and expand here rather than vice versa. Criminal gangs operating out of Poland and the Czech Republic recently have developed close ties to mobsters in Chicago and New York.32 Much of the Russian mob's activity is run directly from Moscow, with the Russian government all but a rubber stamp for gangsters. Russian-based gangsters, and their local chieftains in more than a dozen American cities, have infiltrated Wall Street brokerages, the Bank of New York, the Medicare program, and even the National Hockey League to commit massive scams. Rep. Jim Leach, R-Iowa, chairman of the House Banking Committee, has estimated that billions of dollars have been laundered out of Russia through U.S.-based Russian mobsters since 1995, and that dozens of Western banks have been used as conduits for the money. Russian mobsters also have set up shell companies in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, N.Y., to sponsor U.S. visas for fellow criminals or hire sophisticated money managers and lawyers in Los Angeles and Denver to invest in import-export companies.33 Asian crime lords in the 1990s aggressively recruited immigrants to the U.S. to serve as their foot soldiers.34 Even where organized immigrant crime consists of local gangs, it can be a potent force. In 1992 INS formed a 120-member Violent Gang Task Force; within a few years task force agents were arresting some 2,000 legal and illegal immigrants annually.35 Other Factors The Mexican Commute: Yet another reason for underreporting lies in the fact that criminals from other countries, almost inevitably Mexico, cross over the border to commit crime and then return home to escape prosecution. Police officials in the San Diego area have complained that organized groups from Mexico cross over from Tijuana and commit robberies in middle-income neighborhoods. Indeed, criminal activity along the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego County led local officials in the 1980s to conduct a study of arrest rates according to legal status. In the City of San Diego 26 percent of all burglary arrests and 12 percent of all felony arrests involved illegal aliens, who are estimated to comprise less than 4 percent of the total city population.36 Incomplete Record-Keeping: Immigrant crime also may be underestimated because local law enforcement officials do not keep records on the national origin of the perpetrator. In Dana Point, an affluent Orange County, Calif., coastal community experiencing a wave of immigrant-related crime, a sheriff's officer noted that in a recent year that suburb had three murders, three rapes, 232 vehicle burglaries, 181 residential burglaries, and 108 commercial burglaries. Asked whether he had an ethnic breakdown on these numbers, he replied, "We won't touch that."37 That kind of local policy, especially in larger cities, explains why data based on the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports can explain only so much. While UCR Index is consistent across U.S. cities, and takes account of the most serious offenses, it doesn't measure drug dealing, simple assaults, fraud, vandalism, and weapons violations, among other crimes. Nor given the reluctance of localities to break down crimes by race and ethnicity, does it collect data on that basis either. Butcher and Piehl admit, "Using the UCR may cause us to overlook some important types of crime."38 Neighborhood Ecology: Some researchers believe underreporting is due in part to the tendency of low-income immigrants to settle in low-income neighborhoods — that is, the kinds of neighborhoods more likely than others to be beset with crime. University of Chicago sociologist Robert J. Sampson and colleagues explained high rates of crime in certain Chicago neighborhoods as attributable to a lack of "collective efficacy" on the part of residents. That is, neighbors lacked the social cohesion to intervene on behalf of one another in an emergency. The ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity in neighborhoods with a high concentration of immigrants impedes this mutual trust.39 There is also a reinforcing process at work; that is, the reputation of a neighborhood as rampant with crime may inhibit collective efficacy. The area becomes a less attractive place to live, and thus invites a criminal element which otherwise might suspect their behavior is more closely monitored.40 The Second Generation Even if immigrants are no more prone to commit crimes than are citizens, this tendency may not necessarily hold true for their offspring, who are American-born or at least residents of the U.S. from early childhood. Criminologists in this country long have theorized that the second, more than the first, generation of an immigrant population is likely to drift into crime. The first generation, having braved all kinds of hardship to enter the U.S., found it necessary to defer gratification in the interest of long-term success. But the second generation, though often as poor as their parents upon arrival, has less perspective on the Old World from which their parents came, and often in response develops an attachment to deviant subcultures, such as gangs, as a wayward continuation of the "old-fashioned" European peasant societies of their parents.41 Joining delinquent subcultures can be a way for the second generation to resist acculturation into the mainstream of the new country. The aforementioned federal commission reports of 1901, 1911, and 1931 each observed that the children of immigrants are more predisposed toward crime than their parents.42 The phenomenon of crime among the second generation of the post-1965 immigration liberalization law is recent, and as such has not produced a large body of research. But local law enforcement officials around the nation are all too aware of Hispanic, Asian, and other youth gangs whose members largely were born in the U.S. or were brought here as very young children. In suburban Northern Virginia outside Washington, D.C., police estimate that about 20 to 30 ethnic gangs, with a combined total of more than 2,000 members, have been responsible for dozens of recent attacks involving the use of machetes and baseball bats. Some 600 youths in Fairfax County alone have ties to Mara Salvatrucha, a notorious Los Angeles-based gang (founded in the 1980s by El Salvadoran nationals) responsible for what likely have been hundreds of slayings nationwide over the past decade.43 California State University, Chico, sociologist Tony Waters recently did a full-scale analysis of second-generation immigrant crime, comparing data on selected recent ethnic groups of today with data on certain groups of the early 20th century. The results suggest that the problems brought by high immigration levels can have a substantial echo effect.44 Waters found that second-generation immigrant crime differs widely across nationalities. The key element is the presence or absence of a large proportion of young males. Ethnic groups with high proportions of young males, all things held equal, have a bigger crime problem, although neighborhood ethnic heterogeneity, poverty rates, and other factors do exert influence as well. In the case of Laotians the time lag between migration to the emergence of youth crime was only about five to 10 years, significantly shorter than, for example, Molokan (Russian) immigrants of the 1920s. Table 1 shows the divergence in serious crime rates Waters found among Asian second-generation youth in California in the early 1990s.
Waters is pessimistic that police can do much, beyond traditional means of law enforcement, to stem second-generation youth crime, as it is rooted primarily in the parent-child relationships that prevail within a given national culture. So long as youthful crime is foremost a product of a high-birthrate community, policies to acculturate such a community, will make only modest inroads into reducing crime. "The only way to 'control' youthful crime in immigrant groups," Waters notes, "is to adopt policies that are inconsistent with a modern economy or to control/segregate immigrants in a fashion inconsistent with the basic principles of civil rights. This could include limiting the immigration of spouses…I must reluctantly conclude that little can be done to prevent outbreaks of youthful crime among immigrant populations."45 Some recent European studies also indicate a second-generation crime problem. Dresden University criminologist Hans-Jorg Albrecht found that while first-generation immigrant guest workers had crime rates comparable to those of Germans, second and third generations had substantially higher rates. Foreigners accounted for 25 percent of the prison population in 1994, while in youth correctional facilities the figure stood at 50 percent; in pretrial detention the share of foreigners in many regions reached as high as two-thirds.46
14 For a good example of this syndrome, see various essays in Juan F. Perea, ed., Immigrants Out! The New Nativism and the Anti-Immigrant Impulse in the United States, New York: New York University Press, 1997. 15 Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, New York: Random House, 1995, p. 185. 16 Lisa Bastian, Hispanic Victims, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Special Report, January 1990. 17 Jasmine Kripalani, "Hispanics Unlikely to Report Crime, Police Say," Memphis Commercial Appeal, August 7, 2000. 18 "Immigration and the Justice System," p. 8. 19 Doris Sue Wong, "Gaps Seen in Help for Abused Immigrants," Boston Globe, June 23, 1999. 20 David Rohde, "Couple Charged with Holding Girl in Servitude," The New York Times, July 15, 1999. 21 Cited in Amy Klein, "Alleged Slavery in Detroit Area Reflects Disturbing Global Trend," Detroit Free Press, August 10, 2000. 22 For good summaries, see J.L. Barkas, Victims, New York: Scribners, 1978; M. A. Douglas, "The Battered Woman Syndrome," in Domestic Violence on Trial: Psychological and Legal Dimensions of Family Violence, D.J. Sonkin, ed., New York: Springer, 1987, pp. 39-54; and Jennifer Freyd, Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Child Abuse, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. 23 Thomas Huang, "Immigrant Women Can Face Added Barriers When Trying to Escape from Abusive Spouses," Dallas Morning News, August 20, 1998. 24 Michelle Koidin, "Lawyers Confront Immigration Dilemma," Associated Press, July 2, 1999. 25 Huang, "Immigrant Women..." 26 Quoted in "Immigrants and Crime," Washington, D.C.: Federation for American Immigration Reform, 1997. 27 "Mexican Immigrant Couple Arrested in Smuggling Ring," The Washington Post, August 16, 1997. 28 "The New Slave Trade," Newsweek, June 21, 1993. 29 "Phone Card Fraud Flourishes Among Recent Immigrants," Los Angeles Times, April 8, 1993. 30 "They Take Plastic," Worth, March 1994. Nigerian immigrants have presented an especially thorny crime problem in the U.S. In 1993 David Simcox, writing in Social Contract magazine, reported U.S. law enforcement officials estimate about 75 percent of the 100,000 Nigerians by then in this country were involved in "an impressive and innovative variety of fraud schemes." This is a remarkable figure, but it may seem less so in the context of that nation's indigenous political culture. A 1997 international survey ranked Nigeria as the most corrupt country in the world. See Barbara Crosette, "Survey Ranks Nigeria as Most Corrupt Nation," The New York Times, August 3, 1997. 31 See Elaine Shannon, "A New Credit-Card Scam," Time, June 5, 2000, p. 54. Regan believes the real take in this scam is a good deal higher than an industry estimate of $125 million for 1999. 32 Saskia Sassen, Guests and Aliens, New York: The New Press, 1999, p. 115. 33 Friedman, Red Mafiya, pp. 218-19. 34 "Death on the Spot," Newsweek, December 13, 1993. 35 FAIR, "Immigrants and Crime." 36 Susan Pennell and Christine Curtis, "The Impact of Undocumented Aliens on the Criminal Justice System," draft paper, San Diego Association of Governments, October 1986. 37 Dale Maharidge, The Coming White Minority: California's Eruptions and America's Future, New York: Times Books, 1996. Interestingly, almost none of the crimes occurred within the city's growing number of gated residential communities. This suggests that a lot more immigrant crime would be occurring if the opportunities were more available. Dana Point had been the focus of a lot of countywide tension following the murder of a white teenager by Hispanic gang members and the murder of an Asian gang member by several of his own kind. 38 Butcher and Piehl, "Cross-City Evidence," p. 461. 39 Robert J. Sampson, Stephen W. Raudenbush, and Felton Earls, "Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy," Science, Vol. 277, August 15, 1997, pp. 918-24. 40 See Wesley G. Skogan, Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay in American Neighborhoods, New York: Free Press, 1990; James Q. Wilson and George Kelling, "Making Neighborhoods Safe," The Atlantic Monthly, February 1989, pp. 46-52. 41 This is the classic view held by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942 (rev. ed., 1969). 42 "Immigration and the Justice System," pp. 4-5; Michael Tonry, Introduction, Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration, pp. 20-21. 43 Josh White, "Attacks Raise Fears of Rise of Va. Gangs," The Washington Post, November 20, 2000. 44 Tony Waters, Crime & Immigrant Youth, Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1999. 46 Hans-Jorg Albrecht, "Ethnic Minorities, Crime, and Criminal Justice in Germany," in Tonry, Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration, pp. 31-99.
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