On Monday, Salon spoke with professor Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard University and most prominent member of a new school of academics who say that, contrary to widespread public belief, immigrants may actually be the secret to decreasing crime in the U.S. Sampson et al. believe their research shows immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born Americans, and that immigration itself may actually play a role in lowering the overall crime rate. Salon asked Sampson to rate O’Reilly and Rivera as debaters, and to explain what his research says about immigrants and Americans’ perceptions of them.

What did you think of Bill O’Reilly‘s arguments?

Well, I wasn’t terribly surprised — I think it’s emblematic of a larger way in which these incidents are often perceived, and I think he was thrown off by being confronted with what I thought was a pretty logical argument on Rivera’s part … So basically the way I would interpret it is as follows: [O’Reilly] was interpreting this particular incident, which, of course, is horrible, only from the lens of thinking about the person as an illegal immigrant, rather than actually confronting the data, which show that in fact immigrants, illegal aliens, are disproportionately less likely to be involved in many acts of deviance, crime, drunk driving, any number of things that sort of imperil our well-being. And so what he was doing was starting with the category of the person — illegal — and inferring from that things that don’t follow.

In my opinion, this is sort of typical … unfortunately, for many Americans it seems that the old adage has basically been turned around. Believing is seeing. And I think in this case O’Reilly has a particular perception and belief [about a] category [of person], which then influenced the way he saw and interpreted this particular event, and Rivera called him on it, and he got upset, obviously.

But on some fundamental level, doesn’t O’Reilly have a point — this wouldn’t have happened had Alfredo Ramos not been living in this country, right?

That’s true. And you can follow that logic out for a lot of different things; when I teach my crime classes, I often say, “Well, we can basically eliminate crime, right? If we really wanted to, we could abort all male babies. That would reduce the crime rate to pretty much zero in the future.”

So yes, you can think of counterfactuals — if a category of persons were not actually here, then yes, the crime would not have been committed. But let’s extend that logic: If the majority of people who are in the category of producing most drunk-driving homicides or deaths were not in the country then by definition the rate of drunk-driving deaths would be reduced. So who is that? Well, they’re young people, disproportionately male, disproportionately white, mainly suburban … The perception and the stereotype is what’s driving the argument, not the data.

What have you found in your research about the relation of immigration to the crime rate?

In our research, which is based on over 10 years of data collection and analysis of a long-term study in Chicago, our findings tend to be quite similar to other research showing that first-generation immigrants have lower rates of crime, particularly violent crime. In particular, first-generation immigrants, that is, people born outside the country, are much less likely to commit violence, in our data about 45 percent less likely than third-generation immigrants. In turn, second-generation immigrants are about a quarter less likely to commit crime than third-generation.

So, in other words, native Americans, those born here and whose parents are born here, are the most violent and the most criminal. And that’s not just our data, this is other data. Immigrants are less likely to be imprisoned relative to their numbers; Latinos, in particular, even though they enter the country being disproportionately poor, which would signal, based on everything else we know, that they would have a high risk for all sorts of negative outcomes, including [poor] health, low-birth-weight babies, incarceration, violence and so forth, [are less likely to be imprisoned]. They are doing rather well in many dimensions, and this has led to what is known in the literature as “the Latino paradox.” And the paradox is just that — even though they are disproportionately poor and have all kinds of risk factors, they are doing better in many dimensions. So that particular finding in our data I think is consistent.

Then one can look at all kinds of other data. I would point to two broad trends. One, if you look at the crime rate or the violence rate, or in particular, one which we can measure very well in the United States, let’s take homicide, where in almost all cases there’s a body, so we know how to measure it pretty well. Immigration was exploding, literally, in the United States, going up by the millions — no one disputes this — in the ’90s. I’ve produced charts showing that as that was going up, violence was going down at a very rapid rate. In fact, the two lines are pretty much inverse to each other. Now, that doesn’t prove causation, but it certainly shows that the common perception that as immigration goes up that crime will also go up is just not true.

And then if you look at the cities that are by all accounts immigrant inflows, or border cities in particular, such as El Paso [Texas] or San Diego, Tucson [Ariz.] or other cities, they are not our leaders in violence by any means. In fact, those cities have done quite well. It typically, historically, continues to be cities with high proportions of native Americans that have the high homicide rates, whether it be Baltimore, Detroit, Atlanta or Washington, D.C.

Do the trends for immigrants hold true for illegal aliens in particular? Was Geraldo Rivera right about illegal aliens committing less crime?

It’s hard to break out that precise figure, because of the uncertainty. First of all, we’re not even allowed, because there are certain restrictions placed on our research, to ask about someone’s immigration status.

But … it certainly would track in our data, in most data. If you think about it, the national trend, an over 50 percent increase in immigration flow over the last 10 or more years, has also been highly correlated with the influx of illegals, so you’re finding an influx in both and so the pattern would be similar, and that’s my read of the data. Similarly, in Chicago, the neighborhoods we studied that were immigrant enclaves, they were also where you found illegal immigrants … So to the extent that the patterns hold that link immigration to lower crime, then I think it would also hold for illegal immigrants.