Immigration and crime

Rubén Rumbaut and Walter Ewing have published a thought provoking study on immigrant assimilation in the U.S. Conventional wisdom suggests that recent immigrants are likely to commit crimes. They are young, predominantly male, poor, and not well educated, so we assume they are more dangerous.

Empirically, however, this is not true. As they demonstrate, crime rates have decreased even as immigration has increased (and the patterns hold over the last three censuses). In addition, the foreign born population is much less likely to commit crimes than the native born. In fact, the least likely groups from Latin America to commit crimes are foreign-born Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans, who are precisely the people cited in the media as being more of a problem. They are the least educated, yet also the most law abiding.

One sad conclusion is that assimilation into U.S. culture entails becoming more violent, more likely to take drugs, drink, etc. In other words, we should all start acting a little bit more like recent immigrants…