Thread by @CIS_org

THREAD: One of our most popular reports ever is a 2001 analysis of the link between immigration and crime, by Carl Horowitz. Debates over border security have brought it back into the spotlight.

Here, we'll share some of the insights from that report.
cis.org/Report/Examina…

1/ It is true that GAO analysis indicates that immigrants do not commit crime at a higher rate than the native-born.

However, immigrant crime may be under-reported. A 1990 report from the DOJ's Crime Victimization Survey indicated that Hispanic crime is more under-reported.

2/ As evidence, Hispanics failed to report crimes of all types at a rate nearly twice the rate that they did report; even for violent crimes alone the unreported offenses outnumbered the reported ones.
cis.org/Report/Examina…

3/ Even if immigrants are no more prone to commit crimes than citizens, this tendency may not hold true for their offspring. Tony Waters of CSU Chico found that second-gen immigrant crime differs widely across nationalities.

The table below shows second-gen Asian-American youth:

4/ An additional obstacle to immigrant crime is that those immigrants' governments are often reluctant to take them back, as they may continue their life of crime in their home countries.

These countries often purposely stall in verifying deportees and delay in issuing documents

5/ Immigrant crime often benefits from connections to home countries. For example, criminal gangs operating out of Poland and the Czech Republic have developed close ties to mobsters in Chicago and New York, and this also happened with the Russian mob.

cis.org/Report/Examina…

6/ For more recent analysis, see our report from last year on non-citizen crime, which found that non-citizens account for 21% of federal crimes despite being 8% of the population.

/Thread

cis.org/Camarota/NonCi…