immigration and crime
FEARS:
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A consistent theme in widespread moral panics of immigration is that immigrants are more likely to be violent criminals, thereby having the potential to disrupt the peace and safety of citizens' communities.
"The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses. … Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic. Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country." --The Chicago Tribune, 1868 "When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best... They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists." --Donald Trump, July 2015 According to the graphs above from The Immigration Policy Center, America has seen a significant decline in rates of violence and property crime over the past 30 years--even as the proportion of immigrant Americans has grown.
In fact, although there is widespread consensus that there is no correlation between immigration and crime statistics, some scholars--such as Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson--argues that "increases in immigration and language diversity over the decade of the 1990s predicted decreases in neighborhood homicide rates in the late '90s and up to 2006." He found that Mexican immigrants are actually less prone to violence than native-born citizens, concluding that "Cities of concentrated immigration are some of the safest places around." |