Academic

It's Easy and Wrong to Blame Immigrants for Crime

By University of Houston Law Center

The airline industry has a term for what Houston wants to do about illegal immigrants and the crimes they commit. When pilots make the wrong decisions because of a real or perceived need to rush through their tasks, they are said to have experienced the “hurry-up syndrome.” Inevitably, the end result is a calamity.

When illegal immigrant Juan Quintero allegedly shot and killed Houston police officer Rodney Johnson last month, everyone from radio talk-show hosts to U.S. congressmen properly decried the murder for what it was: a horrific criminal act that merits swift justice for the perpetrator.

But some opinion leaders then rallied around the crime to promote their own version of the “hurry-up syndrome.” They pointed to Quintero as a malevolent example of an immigration policy spinning out of control, and demanded that we act quickly and decisively to eliminate all un-American threats to our families and livelihoods. 

Their call to action is patriotic, heartwarming…..and completely misplaced.  Illegal immigration may create social and economic problems that should be thoughtfully addressed. But there is simply no evidence that illegal immigrants pose a special criminal threat.

It should not surprise anyone to learn that immigrants – both undocumented and otherwise – commit some violent crimes. Even the most jingoistic champion of American values would concede that criminal elements are found in every demographic group.

The real question is whether immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than U.S. citizens. That’s the assertion advanced by U.S. Rep. Ted Poe and others, and it’s the perfect falsehood around which to build an agenda for stiffer immigration policies. But despite the profound fear that many people have of “foreigners,” statistics show that “natives” are more dangerous as a group.

The 2000 U.S. Census data of incarcerated males confirm that foreign-born people commit far fewer crimes per capita than U.S. citizens of every race and ethnicity. All told, U.S.-born people commit crimes at a rate that is approximately four times that of their foreign-born counterparts.

Credit properly goes to Rick Casey of the Houston Chronicle, who in his Sept. 26 column punctured U.S. Rep. Poe’s preposterous claim that “25 homicides a day are committed by people who are illegally in the country” – a figure that would make illegal immigrants responsible for more than half of all U.S. killings. 

Casey exposed Poe’s statistical misstep — but other Houston journalists will inevitably fuel anti-immigrant sentiment when they report “yet another” horrible crime committed by an immigrant in the months to come. Meanwhile, the incipient concept of immigrants as criminals gains traction at Houston’s water coolers, chat rooms and talk-radio stations.

Before an unwarranted hurry-up syndrome consumes us all, we should consider how a lower incidence of crime among immigrants actually exerts a beneficial influence on the Houston region. According to Ramiro Martinez, a criminologist and visiting scholar at the UH Center for Mexican American Studies, research confirms how immigrants provide a stabilizing effect on their communities, reducing crime rates and increasing the area’s economic viability. 

Politicians have held hearings on immigrant criminality and lent a sympathetic ear to heart-wrenching testimony from victims of immigrant crime. The sound bites from these hearings may be compelling – as are the tragic stories of all violent crime victims – but they ultimately tell us nothing about whether immigrants as a group make us more or less safe.

 As tempting as it might be to leap to conclusions and “join the mob” favoring a clamp-down on Houston’s immigrants, history shows that it’s always better to pursue carefully researched and level-headed responses to the needs of our community.

One fact is certain: there is a growing chorus of people determined to protect “us” from “them.” Before we yield to those who want to paint immigrants as evil interlopers threatening the American way of live, we should stop to consider a truer picture: “they” are actually much less dangerous than “us.”

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Full post as published by University of Houston Law Center Faculty Blog on November 02, 2006 (boomark / email).