5 days Ago
Many people seem to be happy that the Trump administration is getting rid of all those criminal immigrants by implementing his policy of mass deportation. There’s just one problem with the assumption behind this thinking. The assumption is that immigrants bring crime, lots of it.
The research, in study after study, says that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, are much less likely to commit crime than the U.S. population as a whole.
As the immigration rate has increased in the U.S., the crime rate has actually dropped significantly.
That’s true of both violent and nonviolent crime. There is no correlation between increasing immigrant population and increasing crime. None.
The percentage of immigrants who are criminals is actually quite low. Said another way, rounding up undocumented immigrants and having stricter enforcement does not reduce crime, nationally or locally, because there’s not that much crime in this population to begin with. The mythology that increased immigration means increased crime is simply not true.
In the panic about largely mythical waves of criminal immigrants, we seem to have forgotten that we have a criminal-justice system. If an immigrant commits a crime and is arrested, tried and sentenced (or pleads guilty), very often when the sentence is completed, the immigrant is deported. This is a system that is already in place.
Because deportation at the end of a sentence is a common outcome, the Education Justice Project, a local organization that works to provide post-secondary education to incarcerated people at the Danville Correctional Center, has created a guide called “A New Path: A Guide to Challenges and Opportunities After Deportation.” Our criminal-justice system already deals with immigrants who are charged with crime. So if the percentage of immigrants who commit crime is low, and our criminal-justice system is doing its job, what is the big outcry about criminal immigrants? Having observed efforts by multiple presidential administrations to round up immigrants and deport them, with a stated emphasis on deporting criminals, I have come to believe that every effort to round up undocumented immigrants who are criminals, no matter if the administration is Democrat or Republican, has always actually been about rounding up immigrants who are not criminals.
Calling the deportees “criminals” makes it more palatable to the general public. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both championed and enforced “Secure Communities,” which was touted as an effort to make our communities safe from immigrants who commit serious crimes.
But what it actually did was deport people with minor traffic infractions, or with a tail light out, or with minor trespassing citations, and in so doing separated and traumatized families. Enforcing “Secure Communities” also created headaches for local law enforcement as their attention was forcibly turned to immigration enforcement rather than focusing on public safety. This caused immigrant communities to be very distrustful of police, meaning they would not report crimes to local law enforcement out of fear, making the community at large less safe.
The Obama administration eventually pulled the plug on “Secure Communities,” but not before the state of Illinois withdrew from cooperating with the program. As a state, we’ve learned that involving law enforcement in immigration enforcement is bad for public safety overall. We don’t do it anymore and have state laws to ensure that law enforcement and immigration enforcement are not confused with one another.
Public safety, not immigration enforcement, is the priority of our law-enforcement officers. On Jan. 15, at a public forum at the University YMCA hosted by the New American Welcome Center, local law-enforcement representatives publicly stated that they will follow the Trust Act, which prohibits local law enforcement from doing immigration enforcement.
When you hear politicians talk about deporting millions of criminal immigrants, please know that there are not millions of criminal immigrants. Instead, most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants who will be targeted have been in the United States, working hard, often establishing their own businesses, raising their families, participating in church life, contributing to their communities, paying their taxes and being generous to people in need. Many of them have been in the United States for 10, 15, 20 or more years.
Their kids may be friends with your kids or grandkids. They may be your neighbors. They may attend your church.
It is these hard-working, family-centered, often big-hearted people who will be deported. It is their families that will be torn apart. It is their lives that will be put in turmoil.
They came for the same reasons many of your ancestors came. They stayed for the same reasons many of your ancestors stayed. They are not criminals, but neighbors.
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