Immigrants Actually Suppress Crime in Gateway Cities – So Why the Panic | Marie Gottschalk

In the moment we’re talking a lot about reform and the potential now to build down the carceral state, and we’ve ignored or overlooked places where it’s rapidly growing. And so what we’re seeing now is law enforcement and immigration enforcement are colliding or converging where they used to be quite separate systems. We’re essentially criminalizing the enforcement of immigration policy.

So during the Reagan years, we had about 20,000 or 25,000 deportations a year. Under President Obama, we’ve had about 400,000 deportations a year until recently. So it’s a dramatic increase in the number of people that are being deported. Many of them are being deported back to countries that they left as children, where they don’t speak the language, and are being deported for minor violations or for violations that they committed many years ago and have not committed a serious crime since then.

Now, what we’re seeing is very similar – I feel like we’re living through the 1960s and 70s again, where we criminalized race in the 1960s and 70s, and now this great unease that we have in society and anxiety has landed on immigrants. That’s even prior to ISIS and the San Bernardino killings and things like that. We’ve created this misperception now that immigrants bring crime and increase crime rates when the data actually tells us that immigrant populations suppress crime rates in gateway cities.

In cities that are not gateways for immigrants, including smaller cities, they neither suppress nor increase the crime rate. But we’ve created this misimpression now that immigrants are bringing lots of crime to the United States and are a destabilizing force.

No, I think one point that’s important to make is that the largest population now in the federal prison system are Hispanics. They’re the largest plurality, larger than whites and larger than African Americans, and many of them are there for immigration-related offenses. Again, when we try to think about the carceral state in black/white terms, we really need to think about immigration.

Because again, drug crimes fueled a lot of the growth of the federal prison system, but immigration crimes are far fewer and much more complex. The other thing to think about immigration is that if we care about crime and we care about protecting our borders, prosecuting so many petty immigration offenses so punitively is taking up all the resources of people on the border.

As many federal prosecutors will tell you, we’ve had many studies done that they’re not pursuing the big drug crimes, they’re not pursuing the big money laundering, the big trafficking of weapons, in part because so many resources are going into prosecuting and taking care of these petty immigration offenses.

In fact, we’re making ourselves more vulnerable rather than less vulnerable by having 80 percent of our prosecutors' time and their cases taken up with petty immigrants at the cost of these much more serious crimes and threats.