Will Increasing Illegal Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime In Your Neighborhood?

As the United States Congress gears up to potentially tackle comprehensive immigration reform in 2014, local, state, and municipal governments continue to operate with large populations of undocumented immigrants and in the context of societal attitudes towards such individuals. One belief is that undocumented immigrants decrease public resources, burden the economy, and increase crime rates within local communities. In response, many localities have implemented policies that seek to combat crime specifically committed by undocumented immigrants.

In their research in Criminology & Public Policy titled “The Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement on Crime and Disorder,” Christopher S. Koper et al. seek to determine the link between illegal immigration and crime while examining the results of immigration enforcement policy on crime rates in Prince William County, Virginia. The researchers find that while undocumented immigrants do commit crimes, increased immigration enforcement does not lower the overall crime rate and results in unintended consequences such as the decreased public approval of law enforcement.

After experiencing a rapid growth in the undocumented immigrant population in the early 2000s, Prince William County sought to lower the number of undocumented immigrants within the state by working with the federal government through Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was established in 1996. This piece of legislation allows for state and local officials to organize and participate in the apprehension of illegal immigrants in conjunction with the federal government. Prince William County’s program, as approved by the Board of Regional Supervisors, requires police to verify the immigration status of any detainees in violation of county or state law whom they had probable cause to believe were in the country illegally. Additionally, the policy mandates that jails perform immigration checks on arrestees. If the arrestees are found to be in the country illegally, they are turned over to federal immigration authorities. Officials expected to see a dramatic decrease in crimes such as petty theft, driving while intoxicated, and gang related crimes due to the deportation and deterrence of illegal immigrants from the community.

Conducting a time series analysis of weekly trends of various reported crimes in Prince William County, Koper et al. controlled for external influences including the flux of the local economy, policy initiatives, trends, drift, and seasonality of crimes spanning from January 2003 to December 2009. Koper et al. found that the implementation of increased immigration enforcement policy did not reduce, in a statistically significant way, the occurrence of overall criminal activity. That activity included property theft, disorderly conduct, drug offenses, DUI, and robbery. The policy also did not alter the number of calls for service over the six year span. However the analysis did show a statistically significant drop in aggravated assaults by 27 percent shortly after July of 2007, which continued to decrease in 2008.

One intended outcome of the policy—the decrease in aggravated assaults—can be traced to an area of the county that has a large concentration of immigrant residents. The authors contend that this may signify either a drop in aggravated assaults or a decline in the likelihood to report them by immigrant residents. Additionally the researchers found various unintended consequences in the Prince William County’s policy including a decrease in public approval of law enforcement, decrease of reported crimes among immigrant populations, and the migration of immigrants to neighboring localities.

Despite the policy avenue taken in Prince William County, the conflicting views of illegal immigration’s effect on communities remain in dispute among many that seek to tackle the problems of overpopulated schools, high unemployment rates, and depleted public resources. If immigration reform does pass into law, the bigger question may be whether the federal government will continue to support local and state governments’ enforcement of immigration laws.

Has the debate of illegal immigration become too heated, too racially charged, and too damaging for public officials, as it did in Arizona? As defined and articulated by Koper et al., immigration enforcement through increased criminal surveillance does not achieve the goal of decreasing crime rates for localities. In a more optimistic tone, other scholars suggest that immigrants, undocumented or not, tend to be “a selected group [of people] with strong work ethic” and deep cultural and familial ties that in fact lower their propensity toward criminal activity.

Article Source: Christopher S. Koper, Thomas M Guterblock, Daniel Woods, Bruce Taylor, and Timothy Cater, “The Effects of Local Immigration Enforcement on Crime and Disorder,” Criminology & Public Policy 12, No. 2 (May 2013): 239-76.

Feature Photo: cc/(Michael Gil)