The Illegal Immigrant Crime Myth

The fury of Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs and other nativists in response to the news that the prime suspect wanted for the murder of Chandra Levy is an illegal immigrant from El Salvador could easily be dismissed as racism. But complicating matters is that most Americans probably agree with them.

The immigration restrictionists point to Salvadoran Ingmar Guandique, who is in prison for knife attacks against two other women, as an example of illegal immigrant crime run amok. "About a half-million serious crimes have been committed by illegal aliens over the past 10 years," declared O'Reilly.

Some polls show that as many as three-fourths of Americans believe that immigrants cause crime to rise. Crime by illegal immigrants in particular has stirred such unease that even liberal communities such as San Francisco and the Washington suburb of Montgomery County, Md., known for providing sanctuary to the undocumented, are now moving to turn in some felony suspects to immigration authorities.

But in all the furor, there is this hitch: The perception of high crime rates by illegal immigrants is pure myth. And it is misdirecting public policy about what we really should do to stop illegal immigration. A century of studies has consistently shown that recent immigrants are in fact less likely to commit a crime or be in jail than native Americans.

The last comprehensive national report, by Ruben G. Rumbaut, Walter A. Ewing and the American Immigration Law Foundation, found two years ago that while the number of unauthorized Latino immigrants in the country doubled between 1994 and 2005, violent crime during the same period dropped nearly 35 percent.

Other studies show that the drop fell faster in major illegal immigrant destinations such as Los Angeles and New York than in cities with lower immigration rates. Rumbaut and Ewing reported that U.S-born men ages 18-39 were five times more likely to be in jail than foreign-born ones, even though nearly 30 percent of those foreign-born were here illegally and often jailed for only that offense.

In California, home to the largest illegal immigrant Latino population, immigrants in 2005 made up about 35 percent of California's adult population but accounted for only 17 percent of the prison population, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

What researchers also have found is a Latino paradox: Their incarceration rates go up one generation to the next. Most Latino crime, in other words, is learned here. It is due to higher rates of family disintegration, drug and alcohol addiction, and gang membership.

To be sure, some illegal immigrants join gangs and are involved in the drug trade. But this is a phenomenon that would exist regardless of there being 12 million illegal immigrants here.

For the overwhelming number of illegal immigrants who are law-abiding and have come to the U.S. merely to work, the solution lies in comprehensive reform that imposes controls, but also responds to labor demand by opening pathways to legal temporary work and citizenship.