Immigration Posts
May 1, 2008: This post is obsolete and wrong in places. For something better, go to:
http://rasmusen.org/t/2008/04/illegal-immigrants-cause-21-of-crime.html
This page will group and improve my posts on immigration.
Illegal Immigrants Cause 21% of Crime
I just ran the numbers to see how much crime is caused by illegal immigrants. I conclude that they cause about 21% of it, a crime rate 6 time that of legal residents, meaning that illegal immigrants cause 3,360 murders, 19,950 rapes, 450,000 burglaries, and 1.45 million serious thefts, besides other categories of crimes.
Here’s my methodology, since this kind of data, despite its obvious importance, isn’t available readily from the government, no doubt as part of the general policy of nonenforcement of immigration laws. My source notes are at the end of this post.
In 2005 there were 10.5 million illegal aliens, according to the government, including about 264,000 in jail and prison for non-immigration crimes. That’s an incarceration rate of 2.5%.
The total population was 296,639,000, including 1,496,000 in jail and prison, for an incarceration rate of 0.50%. Subtracting out illegals, the non-illegal population is then 286,139,000, with 1,235,000 in jail and prison, for an incarceration rate of 0.43%.
21.4% of inmates are thus illegal, and I assume that illegal immigrant criminals are caught and incarcerated at the same rate as domestic ones, and that no criminals are illegal immigrants except those identified in my data source, which is the number of prisoners who have committed at least two misdemeanors that state and local government find out are illegal and ask the federal government for reimbursement for. There are probably more; I don’t know how many.
Then I just multiply the amount of different categories of crimes by 21% to get the number committed by illegal immigrants.
Illegal Alien Invasion Deadlier Than Iraq by Mac Johnson did the calculations a very different way and came up with an estimate of 1,480 murders by year by illegal immigrants. I thought his method (based on crime rates in Mexico, etc.) would be an overestimate, but I see it is less than half of my estimate based on prison records.
The numbers paint a completely different story from the one commonly see in the press under headlines such as “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality” ( “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality,” Harvard Magazine (September-October, 2006) pp. 15-16, discussing Prof. Sampson’s work. See also an article on work by Ruben Rumbaut and Walter Ewing). The reason is simple: the much-cited studies are about legal immigrants, not illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants are by definition unusually law-abiding, and include Indian doctors, Korean grocers, and Mexican grandmothers who are unlikely to be committing many murders and rapes.
Statistical Abstract: crimes: 16 95 401 855 10,328 2,143 6,948 1,237. Multiply each by .21 to get 3,360 fewer murders, 19,950 fewer rapes, 450,000 fewer burglaries, and 1.45 million fewer serious thefts.
Statistical Abstract: 1,496,000 total in prison in 2004.
Statisical Abstract: population in 2005: 296,639,000
* Criminal aliens incarcerated increased from about 42,000 at year-end 2001 to about 49,000 at year-end 2004. [federal prisons only]
* Fiscal year 2002-SCAAP reimbursed all 50 states for incarcerating about 77,000 criminal aliens.
* Fiscal year 2002-SCAAP reimbursed 752 local jurisdictions for incarcerating about 138,000 criminal aliens.
* SCAAP is a Department of Justice (DOJ), Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), program that partially reimburses state and local jurisdictions annually for the cost of incarcerating some but not all criminal aliens illegally in the country. Not all jurisdictions submit for SCAAP reimbursement.
* State and local jurisdictions voluntarily submit data annually on inmates they suspect to be criminal aliens for possible reimbursement. The program reimburses these jurisdictions for criminal aliens who:
-were convicted of a felony or two misdemeanors and incarcerated for a minimum of 4 days and -entered the U.S. without inspection, or were in immigration removal proceedings at the time they were taken into custody; or were admitted as a nonimmigrant and failed to maintain nonimmigrant status.[NOTE 1]
Wikipedia says
The Office of Immigration Statistics in the Department of Homeland Security estimates based on U.S. Census that 10.5 million illegal aliens were living in the United States in May 2005 and that the number grew at a national average of 408,000 a year
Illegal Immigrants Cost America $84 Billion per Year Because of Crime
How much does crime by illegal immigrants cost America each year? My estimate is $84 billion per year.
Crime costs America about $400 billion per year, of which about $167 billion per year is government spending– $72 billion on police, $57 billion on imprisonment, and $38 billion on courts. My blogpost Illegal Immigrants Cause 21% of Crime shows that by a conservative estimate, illegal immigrants cause 21% of crime. 21% of $400 billion is $84 billion, and 21% of $167 billion is $35 billion. (See these powerpoints for sources.)
This totally wipes out the gain from immigration generally estimated in the June 20, 2007 CEO report Immigration’s Economic Impact, which says immigration has a net benefit of $30 billion per year, including both legal and illegal immigrants. It says:
Immigrants have lower crime rates than natives. Among men aged 18 to 40, immigrants are much less likely to be incarcerated than natives. (Source: Butcher and Piehl)
I won’t go into a fullscale critique of Butcher and Piehl’s paper, Why Are Immigrants’ Incarceration Rates So Low? Evidence on Selective Immigration, Deterrence, and Deportation , which concludes that immigrants have lower crime rates than native- born Americans. Points to note, however, are:
1. They lump together legal and illegal immigrants.
2. They adjust for age and sex and education. If a lot of immigrants are young men aged 16 to 30 without high school degrees, it might well be that they commit crimes at no higher a rate than young American male high school dropouts, but the immigrants will still add a huge amount to crime in the United State, all out of proportion to their numbers. Moreover, they won’t “grow out of it”, if they go back to Mexico on reaching age 30– immigrants will still be spending their criminal years in the United States. Also, adjusting for education is misleading. An American who fails to get a high school degree is unusual. I would not be surprised if it is common for an illegal immigrant to fail to have gotten a high school degree. If so, that is comparing underclass Americans to typical immigrants.
Point (2) means that the Butcher-Piehl results are not useful for addressing the question of how expensive immigrants are. Rather, it says that increasing the number of foreign-born high school dropout young males wouldn’t increase the crime rate any more than increasing the number of their domestic equivalents– but either increase would increase crime a lot.