Welcome
Alan Nash's Proposed "10 for 10" Plan
TxSIP Video
» Latest News
TxSIP Alerts
Our Mission
Our Supporters
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Contact My Reps
Sample Letters
Resources
Subscription
Unsubscribe
Contact Us




Crime, Corrections, and California
What Does Immigration Have to Do with It?

By Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl
with research support from Jay Liao

February 2008

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.

Click below to read the full article.


Crime, Corrections, and California

By Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl
with research support from Jay Liao

24 pages - 1.25 MB - Adobe PDF

[ Download The Full Document ]

Political Advertisement Paid by "Texans for Sensible Immigration Policy"
P.O. Box 7011 · Houston, Texas 77248-7011 · 713.869.8346 · info@tsiponline.com

Copyright © 2006 - Texans for Sensible Immigration Policy Site by Advarion Incorporated