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Crimes Less Likely From Immigrants

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By ELAINE SILVESTRINI

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 7, 2008

TAMPA - When three Mexican nationals were arrested for a series of rapes in the Tampa Bay area, public officials battled over how law enforcement handles illegal aliens and some residents complained that the immigrant crime problem had gotten out of hand.

But illegal immigrants actually are less likely than others to commit violent crimes, said researchers who study the issue. In part, they say, that's because the immigrants don't want to draw attention to themselves.

Available data "put the lie to this hyperbole, this immigrant scapegoating, the sensationalizing, and especially the conflation that legal or illegal immigration is associated not only with crime, but with terrorism," said Ruben G. Rumbaut, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine.

Studies and data going back more than a century in the United States consistently show that immigrants - legal and illegal - are far less likely to commit violent crimes than people born in the United States, say Rumbaut and Robert J. Sampson, a professor of social sciences at Harvard.

Rumbaut said the national rate of incarceration, for example, is five times greater for the native-born than for the foreign-born.

'Complete Distortion Of Reality'

Investigators say Rigoberto Morón Martinez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, is responsible for two July attacks in Hillsborough County, a sexual attack Aug. 3 at a St. Petersburg restaurant and an attack Aug. 15 at The Docks restaurant in Apollo Beach. Two other illegal immigrants from Mexico are charged in some of the attacks.

That Martinez was arrested before the Aug. 15 attack and then released set off a round of fingerpointing between U.S. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite and Hillsborough County Sheriff David Gee. Brown-Waite has called for a federal investigation into communications between sheriff's deputies and federal immigration authorities in connection with the earlier arrest.

Brown-Waite, R-Brooksville, said illegal immigrants who commit crimes should be removed from the United States.

The local controversy has provoked anger toward immigrants.

One Brandon resident, Bruce Martin, who frequently posts comments on TBO.com and other Web sites, said he thinks crime by illegal immigrants is "a very bad problem and getting worse."

Martin is not alone. According to a 2007 Gallup poll, 58 percent of Americans think immigrants make the crime situation worse.

When told of some of the researchers' findings, Martin said, "Maybe it is a misperception. But that is what you read. It's very easy to get that opinion from reading the papers."

"One sensational incident arises, and then people with agendas and an ax to grind focus on it, magnify it, amplify it completely out of proportion to convey the idea that all illegal immigrants are doing this, and before you know it, you have a complete distortion of reality," Rumbaut said. "The public perception that immigrants and crime are associated goes back to the beginning of the nation."

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, said some of Rumbaut's data is flawed. Even so, he said, it's possible that the researchers are right.

"Trying to get at this question is like shoveling smoke," said Steven Camarota, a researcher for Krikorian's center, a think tank that supports tougher immigration controls. Camarota said the census data used by Rumbaut are deeply flawed.

Though highly critical of the studies, Camarota said, "I am not one who thinks that there's good evidence that immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than natives."

"This is the kind of issue where public anger can, in fact, be misdirected," Krikorian said. "But in defense of ordinary people ticked off by this sort of thing, you wouldn't have that visceral response as much if the public were confident the government was doing its job already on immigration.

"In other words, if there was a sense the feds ran a tight ship on immigration, then the occasional immigrant criminal wouldn't be as incendiary an issue."

Rumbaut said his studies take into account every available source of information. His sources, he said, range from national and regional surveys measuring violent and other crime; arrest and incarceration records; studies done in cities with major immigrant concentrations; and major national commissions' findings, dating to 1901, on the relationship between immigration, crime and imprisonment.

For the most part, Rumbaut's conclusions seem to be borne out by state prison statistics. Those numbers show that 5.6 percent of those behind bars are not U.S. citizens.

About 19 percent of Florida residents were born in other countries, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Camarota said census statistics show 11.2 percent of Florida residents are not U.S. citizens.

No Local Statistics

Local law enforcement officials said they could not provide local statistics because they do not keep records on where the people they handle were born. They could not contest the national findings.

"Anecdotally, I'm not aware of any kind of violent crime pattern associated with immigrants or illegal immigrants," said St. Petersburg Police Department spokesman Bill Proffitt. "It doesn't stand out as an issue. ...I don't have a series of rapes, robberies or homicides involving Hispanic males or Asian males."

"I would trust that the national trend is probably the same as the local," said Sgt. Jim Bordner of the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office, who also had no specific local statistics. "I would have no reason to believe it wouldn't be."

Pasco County Sheriff's Office spokesman Kevin Doll likewise had no reason to contest the national findings. If anything, he said, illegal immigrants are more likely to be crime victims because criminals know they are less likely to report being victimized.

As immigration has escalated in the United States, rates of violent crime have gone down, Rumbaut said. In cities and communities with higher populations of immigrants, crime rates have gone down more than in areas with lower immigrant populations.

This is the case even though immigrants tend to be young men without high school educations, the demographic description of most prisons.

Sampson said his studies show that crime rates increase among children of immigrants and increase again in the third generation. Third-generation Americans are 45 percent more likely to commit violent crimes than first-generation immigrants, Sampson said.

"There's a high proportion of immigrants in family structures that tend to support one another and not be prone to violence," Sampson said.

Rumbaut said illegal immigrants have powerful incentives not to step out of line in ways that would call law enforcement attention to them and possibly lead to incarceration or deportation.

"We live in a world of 6.5 billion people," Rumbaut said. Only 300 million live outside their country of birth, he said.

In other words, 97 percent of people stay in the nations where they were born.

"Those who immigrate are a highly self-selected population. They tend to be ambitious. They tend to be dreamers. They want to improve and advance. They want something better for their children."

Reporter Josh Poltilove contributed to this report. Reporter Elaine Silvestrini can be reached at esilvestrini@tampatrib.com or (813) 259-7837.

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