Friday - March 09, 2007
If One Enters the U.S. Illegally, They Are More Likely to Commit Other Crimes
Or Committing Crimes Americans Wouldn't Otherwise Do....
A study by FAIR, concludes what most Americans already know. If foreigners are willing to commit the crime of illegally entering America, they are more than likely inclined to commit other crimes. Federal crime statistics back that thinking up. Illegals make up 2.94% of the U.S. adult population, but represent 4.54% of the prison population in America.
Introduction
Most Americans equate illegal aliens with a higher incidence of crime. Some academic researchers have attempted to prove that is a misimpression. But, in fact, data show that the American public understands the facts better than the academics.
Adult illegal aliens represented 2.94 percent of the total adult population of the country in 2003.1 By comparison, the illegal alien prison population represented a bit more than 4.54 percent of the overall prison population. Therefore, deportable criminal aliens were more than half again as likely to be incarcerated as their share of the population.
Misleading Academic Studies
The misleading data produced by academics and think tank researchers that show a lower incidence of crime by aliens is based upon a comparison of data that include all foreign born residents with data for the native born population. Because these data compare all foreign born residents to the native born population, they are largely irrelevant to describing the illegal alien crime incidence.2
A lower incidence of crime should be expected from a foreign born population that is largely legal immigrants and long-term nonimmigrants. This population includes persons who are screened for any previous criminal activities before they can get a green card, persons who are again screened for criminal activity before they can become U.S. citizens, and persons such as foreign students and professional workers who are at the least required to state under oath whether they have any criminal history before they can get a visa. In other words, this is a population carefully screened to assure that they are unlikely to engage in criminal activity. Something would be very wrong with our visa screening process if research did not reveal that the foreign-born were less likely to have committed crimes in the United States than the native-born population.
The same cannot, of course, be said for the illegal alien population. Their presence in the United States is based on their either illegally entering the country or entering under false pretenses. Those who sneak into the country undergo no form of screening for criminality or any other grounds for exclusion. Many in the illegal alien population end up incarcerated as a result of criminal activity at the time of their illegal entry, e.g., drug smuggling or alien smuggling. Other illegal aliens owe alien smugglers for assisting their illegal entry and end up being co-opted into criminal activity, such as drug distribution or prostitution, to pay off the debt.
The apparent linkage between illegal alien status and a higher incidence of crime was suggested in the data presented in a recent study of the costs of illegal immigration in Arizona.3 That study noted that Arizona in 2000 had the highest per capita rate of illegal aliens in the country and also ranked at the top of a number of crime indexes. It had the nation’s highest per capita rate of property crimes, the highest rate of vehicle theft, and the 2nd highest rate in the country of larceny theft. For burglaries, it ranked 5th, for murders 9th, and for robberies and aggravated assaults it ranked 15th in the country.4
There is nothing about the population in Arizona that would appear to explain this pattern of crime incidence other than the illegal alien population and the proximity to the border with Mexico.
Findings Using SCAAP Data
To obtain a valid view of the incidence of criminal activity by illegal aliens in comparison to the general population, it is necessary to focus just on that segment of the population. The only data that directly identify criminal illegal aliens depend on resources of the federal government. The federal State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) is administered by the federal government to reimburse states and local jurisdictions for costs incurred for the incarceration of criminal aliens. It offers the only reliable data for a valid assessment of the share of prisoners who are deportable aliens.
In that program, states and local jurisdictions may submit names and records of persons known or believed to be illegal aliens to the Department of Justice. Those records are vetted to eliminate persons who are U.S. citizens and any aliens whose incarceration does not make them deportable. Data reported in the SCAAP reimbursements were used in this study to determine the correlation between the size of the criminal alien population and the non-criminal alien population.5
Methodology and Findings
Data collected in the SCAAP reporting system were stated in terms of incarceration days. This eliminates any distortion based on length of sentence. Nationwide there were nearly 600 million incarceration days reported, and the number of those days attributable to identified and suspected illegal aliens were about 24.5 million incarceration days. That suggests that one of every 22 prisoners is a deportable alien (4.54%).
The comparison of this prisoner population with the population at large requires identifying a comparable population. Clearly only adults or near adults are likely to be in this population. To obtain an estimate of adult illegal aliens the INS estimates can be used, even though they probably understate the size of that population. To adjust those estimates to a population comparable to an adult population the only available resource is to reduce the INS estimate by an estimate of illegal alien school-age population. The estimate of illegal alien school-age children, done in an earlier study, provides a rough estimate of the K-12 population by state.6 Because of the age profile of this group, there will be some pre-K illegal aliens and post-grade 12 illegal alien teenagers included in the resulting estimate of a bit more than 7 million illegal aliens in 2000. The comparable adult national population in 2000 is about 240.4 million persons, and the comparison of these two data sets yields a 2.94 percent share of the adult national population that is comprised of illegal aliens, i.e., one in every 34 residents in the country.
Thus the likelihood that an illegal alien will be among those incarcerated (1 in 22) is significantly greater than the share of adult illegal aliens in the country (1 in 34). It is this greater likelihood of being incarcerated that clearly demonstrates that illegal aliens are disproportionately involved in criminal activity.
Imagine that, people who break the law entering the United States tend to keep breaking the law. What other undesirable traits do illegal aliens bring to the table? Be honest and think about it. They come from Third World countries, thus they have lower levels of education, they have lower sets of desirable skills, and they are less healthy.
The left argues that illegals from the Third World add to our cultural diversity. The right argues that these people perform tasks normal Americans won't. To hell with both sides. Our national identity and well-being is at stake. How can people be willing to sell our nation down the river for the sake of being politically correct or for making a buck?
Since when is it desirable to bring in people with lower levels of education, IQ (see here and here), work skills, and health to the U.S.? Shouldn't the U.S. be recruiting immigrants who are educated and bring needed skills to America? Bringing the Third World to America can't be in our national interests.
