Economist (Opinion)
July 10, 2015
IN
AN attempt to lend empirical heft to his assertion that America has
become "a dumping ground" for Mexico's criminal element, Donald Trump, a
billionaire landlord and
Republican presidential candidate, pointed to the case of Juan
Francisco Lopez Sanchez, an undocumented Mexican national, who is
accused of murdering a 32-year-old white woman last week in San
Francisco. "This senseless and totally preventable act of violence
committed by an illegal immigrant is yet another example of why we must
secure our border immediately," Mr Trump said.
It
ought to be unnecessary to say that Mr Sanchez is not representative of
Mexican immigrants, documented or undocumented. However, in light of
the startling success of
Mr Trump's message of fear, it seems many still need some convincing
that such claims are specious. As it happens, a swift glance at the data
handily undermines Mr Trump’s case that Latin American immigrants are
prone to crime.
America's
major cities, and the country as a whole, have seen a significant
decline in rates of violent and property crime over the past 30 or so
years. Crime has fallen
even as the proportion of Americans born on foreign soil has grown, and
as rates of unauthorised immigration have gone up, as illustrated by
these graphs from the Immigration Policy Center.
This
is not to say that rising immigration caused crime to go down, though
some criminologists think the two trends are related. No one knows for
sure what combination
of factors led to America's happy slide in crime rates. But there is
little indication that the surge in immigration from the 1990s to the
late 2000s, largely from Mexico and Central America, contributed to an
increase, or retarded the decrease, in crime.
According to Jörg Spenkuch, an economist at Northwestern University,
increased immigration may have been associated with a barely
statistically significant uptick in property crime, but crunching the
numbers turns up "essentially no correlation between immigrants
and violent crime".
Indeed,
Robert Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard, has found that "increases in
immigration and language diversity over the decade of the 1990s
predicted decreases in neighborhood
homicide rates in the late '90s and up to 2006." An eight-year study of
violence in Chicago led Mr Sampson to conclude that Mexican immigrants
are less prone to violence than native-born Americans, whites or black,
of comparable age and socio-economic status.
In recent years, El Paso, Texas has had the lowest murder rate of any
American city with a population of 500,000 or more, despite sitting
directly across the Rio Grande from Juarez, a Mexican city plagued with
horrific gang violence. Other metropolitan magnets
for new arrivals from south of the border, such as San Diego, San
Antonio and Phoenix, are similarly pacific. "Cities of concentrated
immigration are some of the safest places around," Mr Sampson observes.
These
patterns are reflected, as one would expect, in data on incarceration
rates. White men born in America are twice as likely to end up in prison
as men born abroad,
while American-born black men are many times more likely to land in
jail than their immigrant counterparts. As a general matter, individuals
with less education are more likely to get locked up. Nevertheless,
immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico,
who tend to be relatively unschooled, are put behind bars at lower
rates than white Americans who didn't make it to graduation. In fact,
American white guys with high-school diplomas are more likely to get
tossed in the can than Guatemalan or Honduran fellows
without them.
It's
worth pointing out, as immigration opponents are quick to do, that
incarceration rates jump considerably for the American-born children and
grandchildren of immigrants.
Thus, the incarceration rate of the American children and grandchildren
of Mexican immigrants is about twice that of native-born non-Hispanic
whites, and about half that of native-born blacks. It's an interesting
and puzzling fact that certainly deserves attention
when considering the effects of immigration and the challenges of
assimilation. What it's not is evidence of the criminality of
immigrants.
Mr
Trump has claimed that "[w]hen Mexico sends its people, they’re not
sending their best". Yet the evidence suggests that the people America
has been taking in are truly
and remarkably civil. If not the best, they're awfully good.
Undocumented killers such as Mr Sanchez may inflame the xenophobic
imagination, but America's violent criminals are much more likely to be
home-grown than imported.
It
makes sense that people with the gumption to uproot their lives to
build better ones in a strange new land will be inclined to work hard
and play by the rules. Undocumented
immigrants have even more at stake; the lightest brush with the law can
get them deported. When your correspondent lived in Houston, it seemed
he was always getting stuck in traffic behind pick-up trucks laden with
heavy lawn equipment. It wasn't that they
were weighed down by their loads, or couldn't take a fast corner
without losing a leaf-blower. It's just that Mexican landscapers are
very careful to observe the speed limit. The inconvenience of such
painstaking lawfulness is a more common symptom of America's
immigration "problem" than crime. If Mr Trump cared to be accurate, he
would be complaining about an infestation of upright drivers on their
way to work.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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