RE:"llegal Aliens Account for 27.3% of the Federal Prison Population."
Someone's wrong.....
migrationinformation.org
"Because many immigrants, especially labor migrants from Mexico and Central America and refugees from Southeast Asia, are young men who have arrived with very low levels of education, conventional wisdom — both in the form of nativist stereotype as well as standard criminological theory — tends to associate them with high rates of crime and incarceration. The unauthorized entry and visa overstays of many, framed as an assault against the "rule of law" by pundits and politicians (most notoriously by a House of Representatives bill, passed in December 2005, which would make felons of all "illegal" immigrants and criminalize those who assist them), reinforces the stereotypical association of immigration and criminality in much public discourse. This association flourishes in a post-9/11 climate of fear and ignorance where "terrorism" and "losing control of our borders" are often mentioned in the same breath, if without any evidence to back them up.
But correlation is not causation. In fact, immigrants have the lowest rates of imprisonment for criminal convictions in American society. Both the national and local-level findings presented here turn conventional wisdom on its head and present a challenge to criminological theory as well as to sociological perspectives on "straight-line assimilation."
For every ethnic group without exception, the census data show an increase in rates of criminal incarceration among young men from the foreign-born to the US-born generations, and over time in the United States among the foreign born — exactly the opposite of what is typically assumed both by standard theories and by public opinion on immigration and crime.
Paradoxically, incarceration rates are lowest among immigrant young men, even among the least educated and the least acculturated among them, but they increase sharply among the US born and acculturated second generation, especially among the least educated — evidence of downward assimilation that parallels patterns observed for marginalized native minorities.
What is more, these patterns have now been observed consistently over the last three decennial censuses, a period that spans precisely the eras of mass immigration and mass imprisonment — and they recall similar findings reported by three major commissions during the first three decades of the 20th century, a previous era of mass migration and crime concerns. |
