Published March 2, 2008 ----

In the argument over illegal immigration and its ravages upon the American landscape, many have accepted it as indisputable fact: U.S. jails are overflowing with Mexican nationals — scofflaws who have forded the Rio Grande or staggered across the Baja desert in order to rape, rob and pillage.

The reality, it turns out, is much different. Immigrants — illegal or not — are far less likely than the average U.S. native to commit crime in California, according to a report released last week by the Public Policy Institute of California. Foreign-born adults, including noncitizen men from Mexico, are incarcerated and institutionalized at rates vastly lower than those of natural citizens.

The study, “Crime, Corrections, and California: What Does Immigration Have to Do with It?,” found, among other things, that U.S.-born adult men reside in state prisons at rates as much as 3.3 times higher than foreign-born men.

 The study, which reiterates the findings of previous research, also found that U.S.-born men ages 18 to 40 are 10 times more likely than immigrants to be in county jail or state prison. And Mexican men of that age are eight times less likely than U.S.-born men in that age group to be in a jail setting.

Education, or lack thereof, seems to be a negligible factor as far as new immigrants are concerned, according to the study. More than 13 percent of American men in the 18 to 40 age bracket who lack high school diplomas are in state prisons, county jails, halfway houses or other institutions. Less than 1 percent of same-age, same-education immigrant men are in similar circumstances.

Still, with illegal immigration on the rise, can’t we expect crime rates will start going up? If history is any indication, no. The researchers studied 29 California cities between 2000 and 2005 and discovered, on average, that cities with higher rates of newly arrived foreigners exhibited a bigger drop in crime than cities with lower rates of new immigrants.

For example, Bakersfield’s property crime rate increased by approximately 1,500 crimes per 100,000 residents between 2000 and 2005, highest among the 29 cities studied. But its percentage of recently arriving immigrants was only about 3 percent, one of the lowest among the cities studied during that period.

The research does not mean that government should ignore illegal immigration. It does not mean that hiring restrictions should be dismissed. (Indeed, it may be that as immigrant men take jobs from U.S.-born men, native Americans are driven to illegal activities.) And it does not mean researchers shrugged off the fact that illegally crossing the border into the U.S. is a crime in itself.

The study merely underscores the fact that concerns about the alleged criminal behavior among immigrants, although always relevant, has a limited place in scare-tactic talking points about illegal immigration.

America needs a comprehensive immigration reform bill. But the alleged criminal threat posed by immigrants is not the reason why.

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Read report, reply

The Public Policy Institute of California’s latest study examines the effects of immigration on public safety in California.

The study’s  authors, Kristin F. Butcher, an associate professor of economics at Wellesley College, and Anne Morrison Piehl, who teaches economics and criminal justice at Rutgers University, used data on incarceration and institutionalization to represent assumed levels of criminal involvement.

The PPIC — a private, nonprofit, nonpartisan organization founded in 1994 — found that foreign-born people, who comprise 35 percent of California adults, constitute only 17 percent of the adult prison population.

That makes immigrants underrepresented in California prisons based on their share of the overall population — precisely the opposite of what many would expect based on American political discourse.

Read the report yourself: It’s at www.ppic.org — under “new publications.” Then tell us what you think. Write us at opinion@bakersfield.com.