ESTUDIO SOBRE LA RELACIÓN ENTRE CRIMINAL

find the full report at:  http://www.ime.gob.mx/documentos/crime_corrections_california.pdf

Crime, Corrections, and 
California

What Does Immigration Have to Do with It?

By Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl 
with research support from Jay Liao

Few issues are as contentious as immigration and crime. Concern
over the effects of immigration on crime is longstanding, and bans
against criminal aliens constituted some of the earliest restrictions
on immigration to the United States (Kanstroom, 2007). More
recently, policies adopted in the mid-1990s greatly expanded the
scope of acts for which noncitizens may be expelled from the United States. Even so, many
calls to curtail immigration, particularly illegal immigration, appeal to public fears about
immigrants’ involvement in criminal activities.
 Are such fears justified? On the one hand, immigration policy screens the foreign-born
for criminal history and assigns extra penalties to noncitizens who commit crimes, suggest-
ing that the foreign-born would be less likely than the U.S.-born to be involved in criminal
enterprises. On the other hand, in California, immigrants are more likely than the U.S.-born
to be young and male; they are also more likely to have low levels of education. These charac-
teristics are typically related to criminal activity, providing some basis for concern that immi-
grants may be more criminally active than the U.S.-born.
 In this issue of California Counts, we examine the effects of immigration on public safety
in California. In our assessments, we use measures of incarceration and institutionalization as 
proxies for criminal involvement. We find that the foreign-born, who make up about 35 per-
cent of the adult population in California, constitute only about 17 percent of the adult prison population. Thus, immigrants are underrepresented in California prisons
compared to their representation in the overall population. In fact, U.S.-
born adult men are incarcerated at a rate over two-and-a-half times greater
than that of foreign-born men.
 The difference only grows when we expand our investigation. When
we consider all institutionalization (not only prisons but also jails, halfway
houses, and the like) and focus on the population that is most likely to 
be in institutions because of criminal activity (men ages 18–40), we find
that, in California, U.S.-born men have an institutionalization rate that
is 10 times higher than that of foreign-born men (4.2% vs. 0.42%). And
when we compare foreign-born men to U.S.-born men with similar age
and education levels, these differences become even greater. Indeed, our
evidence suggests that increasing educational requirements in the provision
of visas would have very little effect in the criminal justice arena.
 But immigrants may affect public safety in ways other than direct
involvement in criminal activity. For example, immigrants may induce
more criminal activity among the U.S.-born by displacing the work oppor-
tunities of the U.S.-born; in other words, immigrants may “take away”
legal jobs, possibly leading to more crime among natives. To measure
underlying criminal activity more broadly, we also investigate crime rates
in California cities. We find that on average, between 2000 and 2005,
cities that had a higher share of recent immigrants saw their crime rates
fall further than cities with a lower share. This finding is especially strong
when it comes to violent crime.
 Finally, even if immigrants are less likely to engage in criminal activity
than the average native, the criminal activity of their U.S.-born children is
also of interest. Therefore, we briefly discuss current evidence on later gen-
erations, finding continued low levels of criminal activity.
 Taken together, our findings suggest that spending additional dollars
to reduce immigration or to increase enforcement against the foreign-born
will not have a high return in terms of public safety. The foreign-born in
California already have extremely low rates of criminal activity.

            

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