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INTRODUCTION

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has reignited a key debate about American immigration policy. Do illegal aliens commit crimes at a higher rate than native-born U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants? And, if so, how should that influence any pro- posed changes to our immigration system?

Advocates of open borders are fond of claiming that illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than native-born U.S. citizens. That makes perfect sense, they assert, because illegal aliens do not wish to be brought to the attention of law enforcement and risk deportation from the United States.

In reality, however, this is a weak argument. Since the implementation of the 1965 version of the Immigration and Nationality Act, the enforcement of our immigration laws has been comparatively feeble. And the emergence of the “sanctuary city” movement in the 1980s meant that state and local police in many jurisdictions refused to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. As a result, for many decades, only those illegal aliens with particularly serious criminal convictions had any real fear of deportation.

While the Trump administration has taken unlawful migration seriously, most illegal aliens still have little to fear. The vast majority of recent enforcement efforts have been directed at narrow groups of individuals who fit a specific profile, e.g. gang members, those working without authorization, etc. And, as the protests following President Trump’s rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program clearly demonstrate, many illegal aliens feel perfectly comfortable announcing their unlawful status and making demands of the United States government.[1] Hence, their motto, “Undocumented and unafraid!”

Nevertheless, despite evidence to the contrary, open-borders advocates have persisted in their claims that fear of deportation means illegal aliens are inherently pre-disposed to avoiding criminal behavior. (This argument conveniently ignores the fact that improper entry by an alien is, in and of itself, a federal crime). Are these assertions legitimate?

Hard data indicate that they are not. Research conducted by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) strongly suggests all claims that illegal aliens commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born U.S. citizens, or lawfully-present immigrants, are a myth. In fact, this report finds that in the states examined, illegal aliens are incarcerated up to five and a half times as frequently as citizens and legal immigrants.

A False Narrative, Based on Bad Data

As noted above, for decades, open-borders proponents have parroted the same narrative: “Illegal aliens commit less crime than native-born citizens.” However, this claim typically rests on studies that manipulate data in order to support the fictitious “illegal aliens = less crime” narrative.

Why are the majority of studies of illegal alien criminality so flawed? First, as Peter Kirsanow, of National Review notes, “Illegal-immigrant crime calculations conveniently and invariably steal a base by leaving out the millions of crimes committed by illegal immigrants related to procuring fraudulent social security numbers, obtaining false drivers’ licenses, using fraudulent green cards, and improperly accessing public benefits.”[2] That error is then compounded when researchers intentionally elect to leave out broad classes of crimes for example, drug offenses — as the Cato Institute frequently does.[3]

Secondly, most federal, state and local government agencies do not collect data on the rates at which illegal aliens are convicted of crimes. Most likely, this is due to political correctness, and a desire to keep the truth about the number of crimes committed by illegal aliens from coming to light. Peter Kirsanow is one of the few who has commented openly on this tendency. He states, “Unfortunately, almost every public official not named Jeff Sessions guards against disclosure of illegal-immigrant crime data more tenaciously than disclosure of nuclear launch codes.”[4] Regardless of why this information is not collected, the end result is that there are a limited number of sources for obtaining data on crimes committed by known illegal aliens.

Finally, most researchers tend to ignore the few established sources that provide data on criminal acts by known illegal aliens. They point to all types of alleged, and typically baseless, “flaws” in this data, ranging from “limited sample size” to an inability to determine whether illegal aliens are being counted more than once. In actuality, however, the only real flaw, from the perspective of mainstream research organizations, is that examinations of data on criminal activity by known illegal aliens tend to establish that those who enter the U.S. in violation of our immigration laws also commit other crimes at a higher rate.

This should not be surprising to anyone. The simple fact that illegal aliens violated American immigration laws – and must continuously violate other federal, state and local laws in order to mask their ongoing illegal presence in this country – demonstrates a blatant lack of respect for the rule of law.

Getting A Realistic Portrait Of Illegal Alien Crime

How FAIR Researched This Issue

This report examines the rate at which illegal aliens are incarcerated in state and local correc- tional facilities after being convicted of a crime. To determine that rate:

We analyzed incarceration data from the federal government’s State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) and compared it to the public records of state and local prisons. [5]

Via SCAAP, state entities apply to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to obtain reimbursement for the costs associated with incarcerating illegal aliens.

Accordingly, the rate at which a state seeks reimbursement provides a good snapshot of the number of illegal aliens in its criminal justice system.

In order to estimate how many illegal aliens are currently incarcerated in a given state, we relied on data from the most recent SCAAP report published by the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA). [6]

Our other calculations are based on commonly available state corrections/criminal justice reports and other non-SCAPP federal data.

The Data We Used

This report focuses on Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Texas and Washington because:

The majority of the illegal population in the United States lives within these states.

Individually, they all have significant, dense illegal alien populations.

They consistently report to SCAAP, and therefore have the most reliable and complete data.

The majority of the population in these states lives within a SCAAP-reporting district.

There is little to suggest that our conclusions would be significantly different were we somehow able to obtain valid data for those jurisdictions that either do not participate in SCAAP or that do not produce enough SCAAP data to reliably estimate their total numbers of incarcerated illegal aliens.

Taken together, these ten reporting states represent a statistically significant sample. Although the calculations in this report are specific to those states, they include 65 percent of the total illegal alien population in the U.S. Therefore, even if the majority of unlawfully-present foreigners in the states not covered were never arrested, the rate at which illegal aliens are incarcerated would not change appreciably.

This report does not cover illegal aliens who have been convicted of federal criminal charges and are serving time in a Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facility. Therefore, it does not include those illegal aliens incarcerated for committing immigration-related crimes such as illegal re-entry, welfare fraud, or identity theft.

Summary of Findings

Key Findings in Brief

FAIR found that in all SCAAP-reporting states along the Southern Border, and in SCAAP-reporting interior states that are preferred destinations for unlawful migrants, illegal aliens are incarcerated at a much higher rate than citizens and lawfully-present aliens. [7]

SCAAP data indicate that illegal aliens are typically at least three times as likely to be incarcerated than citizens and lawfully-present aliens.

Since the SCAAP program only includes those illegal aliens who have, at some point, been convicted of a crime, the only reasonable conclusion is that illegal aliens must commit crimes at a higher rate than citizens or lawfully-present aliens in order to be incarcerated at such high rates.

These findings stand in stark contrast to the narrative pushed by the open-borders lobby that illegal aliens are less likely to commit crimes compared to citizens or lawfully-present aliens.

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