Opponents of immigration often lament the fact that the US used to attract high quality immigrants from places like Europe, but now is supposedly being overwhelmed with immigrants from “backward” countries. A recent NBER paper by Ran Abramitzky, Leah Platt Boustan, Elisa Jácome, Santiago Pérez, and Juan David Torres suggests that the golden age of immigration is to be found in the present, not the past.
Contrary to this anti-immigrant rhetoric, we document that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history. We combine newly assembled full-count Census data (1870–1940) with Census/ACS samples (1950–2020) to construct the first nationally representative series of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born between 1870 and the present day. From 1870 to 1950, immigrants’ incarceration rate was only slightly lower than that of US-born men. However, starting in 1960, immigrants have become significantly less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born, even though as a group immigrants now are relatively younger, more likely to be non-white, have lower incomes, and are less educated – characteristics often associated with involvement in the criminal justice system. Today, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than all US-born men, and 30% less likely to be incarcerated relative to white US-born men. The similar incarceration rates between immigrants and the US-born in the past and the lower incarceration rates of immigrants today are broadly consistent with prior studies documenting immigrant-US-born incarceration gaps for specific states and time periods (Moehling and Piehl 2009, 2014; Butcher and Piehl 1998b, 2007).
When I have pointed to the lower crime rate of immigrants, people have often responded that their crime rate needed to be compared to that of white native born Americans. That always struck me as odd, as these were often the very same people who opposed “identity politics” and insisted that people should be judged based on their merits, not on the color of their skin. If one insists that immigrants be compared only to white Americans, doesn’t that implicitly suggests that non-white residents of the US are not true Americans?
In any case, it’s now pretty clear that even native born whites are more likely to engage in criminal behavior than immigrants. There may be good arguments against more immigration, but it is increasingly clear that the following 5 arguments have been discredited:
1. The US is in danger of overpopulation. (The US fertility rate (births/woman) is down to 1.7, and still declining.)
2. Immigrants cause higher unemployment. (The unemployment rate is determined by monetary policy, and regulations such as minimum wage laws.)
3. Immigrants cause more crime. (Immigration makes us safer, as immigrants cause crime to rise by less than total population.
4. Immigrants lower wages for the unskilled. (The wages of low income workers have recently been rising faster than the wages of higher income workers.)
5. Immigration will favor one political party. (Immigrants are rapidly adopting the political views of native born Americans.)
And I haven’t even included the long discredited claim that immigrants won’t learn English, which was a popular idea in the 1990s.
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