Crime, Corrections, and California: What Does Immigration have to do with it?

Few issues are as contentious as immigration and crime. Concern
over the effects of immigration on crime is longstanding, and bans
against criminal aliens constituted some of the earliest restrictions
on immigration to the United States (Kanstroom, 2007). More
recently, policies adopted in the mid-1990s greatly expanded the
scope of acts for which noncitizens may be expelled from the United States. Even so, many calls to curtail immigration, particularly illegal immigration, appeal to public fears about immigrants’ involvement in criminal activities.
Are such fears justified? On the one hand, immigration policy screens the foreign-born for criminal history and assigns extra penalties to noncitizens who commit crimes, suggesting that the foreign-born would be less likely than the U.S.-born to be involved in criminal enterprises. On the other hand, in California, immigrants are more likely than the U.S.-born to be young and male; they are also more likely to have low levels of education. These characteristics are typically related to criminal activity, providing some basis for concern that immigrants
may be more criminally active than the U.S.-born.



http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_208KBCC.pdf

Posted by [Melissa Diaz]