The UK Home Office has been making a big song and dance about deporting foreign nationals who have committed various crimes in recent months.  The acts are playing on the fears that immigrants are criminals who diminish the vitality and safety of the country.

New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison paints a more realistic picture and shows that crime rates among immigrants are much lower than among native citizens, with those among undocumented immigrants lowest of all.  Indeed, US citizens were twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes than undocumented immigrants.

Criminal records

The researchers trawled through data from Texas’ criminal history database over a six-year period, with over 1.8 million arrests analyzed in total.  This allowed them to calculate the crime rate of US-born citizens, legal immigrants, and undocumented immigrants for a range of offenses.

The level of data held by the Texan authorities is in large part due to the federal government’s Secure Communities Program, which requires states to share information on immigration status, largely so that criminals can be deported.

When local law enforcement agents arrest suspects, they compare the biometric information of the individual with federal databases, thus alerting US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that a non-citizen has been arrested.  Despite the strict nature of the act, there is little real evidence that Secure Communities has had any impact on crime rates, despite it deporting over 200,000 people in the first four years of operation.

“If the plan was to make communities safer, to reduce the likelihood of, say, a felony violent assault in these communities through deportation, it did not deliver on that promise,” the researchers say. “Our results help us understand why that is. The population of people we deported simply were not a unique criminal risk. Removing them isn’t going to make you all that safer.”

Safer communities

The research doesn’t provide any insight as to why immigrants commit fewer crimes than native citizens, but the researchers do explain that it’s common for first-generation immigrants to be more law-abiding.  This is especially so among undocumented immigrants.

“They have a tremendous incentive to avoid criminal wrongdoing. The greatest fear among undocumented immigrants is getting in legal trouble that leads to deportation,” they explain.

What’s more, the very act of undocumented immigration tends to attract a certain kind of person.  Contrary to the myth right-wing commentators present of such people being hardened criminals, the reality is usually very different.

“There’s lots of opportunity to commit crimes in Mexico and Venezuela and other places people are emigrating from,” the researchers explain. “The argument is that many people who want to immigrate are selected on attributes like ambition to achieve, to find economic opportunities, and those types of things aren’t very highly correlated with having a criminal propensity.”

The researchers hope that their findings might help to inform smarter and more empathetic immigration policymaking that is driven by the reality rather than fearmongering.

“The conversation about undocumented immigration should be informed by the best empirical evidence,” they conclude. “If somebody says we know undocumented immigrants increase the crime rate, well, I’d say the weight of evidence is not in their favor.”