Police Clearance Rates Are Not Lower in States with Many Illegal Immigrants

Immigrant criminality and its impact on the United States is one of the most important issues in the public debate over immigration. In order to provide new insight into this topic, my coauthor Michelangelo Landgrave and I have attempted to estimate theillegal immigrantincarceration rate. I have also written a shortpaper on Texas criminal conviction rates by immigration status and crime based on data provided by the state of Texas. All three papers found that illegal immigrants were less likely to be convicted or incarcerated for crimes than native-born Americans.Mypaper on illegal immigrant crime rates in Texas is based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) that I obtained through a Public Information Act request. The Texas DPS data separately show the number of convictions and arrests of illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born Americans for 44 and 46 different crimes, respectively, in the state of Texas by year from January 1, 2011, to November 15, 2017.One of the persistent criticisms of my paper on Texas criminal conviction rates is that the DPS data do not record the number of illegal immigrants who commit crimes but arenot convicted. Given data limitations, that is probably an impossible question to answer in a satisfactory way for immigrants and for natives.   However, I try to address this criticism in my Texas paper by showing that the gap between the arrest rates and conviction rates for illegal immigrants and the gap between the ar...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs