Report: Impact of Immigration on Public Safety

From the Sentencing Project (http://www.sentencingproject.org):

As the country debates the merits of heightened immigration enforcement, The Sentencing Project is pleased to share a new survey of key research about the impact of immigration on public safety. The report finds immigrants have significantly lower rates of criminality than native-born citizens and may have contributed to the historic crime-drop of the last 20 years. 

Immigration and Public Safety, authored by Nazgol Ghandnoosh, Ph.D. and Josh Rovner, highlights four key findings:

1. Immigrants—regardless of legal status—commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens.
2. Higher levels of immigration in recent decades may have contributed to the historic drop in crime rates.
3. Police chiefs believe that intensifying immigration enforcement undermines public safety.
4. Immigrants are under-represented in the U.S. prison population; and the majority of those receiving federal sentences were convicted of immigration law violations.

Since 1990, violent crime rates have fallen by half even as the number of immigrants doubled, and the number of undocumented immigrants tripled. Many communities where immigrants have settled have outpaced the national trends in crime reduction. A University at Buffalo study examined crime in 200 metropolitan areas with varying immigrant population sizes from 1970 to 2010. The researchers found that cities with larger immigrant communities saw much greater declines in homicides than cities with smaller immigrant populations.

Additional research suggests that immigrants help lower the crime rate in their neighborhoods because of their strong familial ties, their civic engagement, their fear of the justice system and the increased economic activity they generate in their communities.

Law enforcement leaders across the country have sought to separate their traditional crime-fighting work from federal immigration priorities in order to ensure that immigrant victims feel comfortable reporting crimes and so that immigrant witnesses are willing to cooperate in criminal investigations.

We hope this resource will enable the public and policymakers to engage in a more meaningful policy debate around immigration and public safety rooted in the facts.

You can read The Sentencing Project’s full report here.