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.
What is it about immigrants, do you think, that makes them less likely to commit crime?
There are several things that I would point to. One is just a simple selection factor, as we would call it in the academic literature. What that means is that the pool of people that are coming into the country are selected on certain characteristics, such as wanting to get ahead in the United States, and that's associated with working hard, keeping out of trouble, keeping their heads down. Then it's not terribly surprising, if you think about it, that people who are coming here to better their lives would not necessarily be picking up and doing crime right away. It's a selection factor that makes a lot of sense.
And this is not just from Mexico, but if you're thinking about immigration from around the world. That's another factor, I think, that in any story about immigration has to be emphasized, that this is now something that is going on in all ethnic groups.
Secondly, and related to it, there's less incentive to commit crime, and greater sanctions, because of course one can be deported, and one doesn't want to draw attention to oneself.
Third, I think there's a family structure relationship here, in that the immigrants, at least in our data, are much more likely to be in intact families. In Chicago, for example, the Mexican-Americans are more likely to be married even than whites, and family structure is related to the risk of certain outcomes among offspring in our data and [that of other researchers]. So the fact that there are more intact families is, I think, part of the explanation, which of course also points out an irony in the anti-immigrant onslaught from the far right. David Brooks has written about this. If one views family intactness as "family values," then one would be actually in favor of more immigration. That's an interesting irony there.
Fourth ... increasing immigration has been associated with changes in cities in particular. We've seen this rebuilding and economic boom in part, I believe, due to immigration. That is something that would lead to lower crime.
And lastly, which is a little bit more speculative on my part, but I think it's an interesting hypothesis to consider, is that a lot of violence in American cities is associated with subcultures of honor. The notion [is] that a lot of homicides, in particular, derive from disputes over honor and a sense of perceived insult. And that sort of honor system or cultural system, if it exists, then to the extent that is diluted by immigration, then one would expect lower crime rates. At the very least, you would think that immigrants are less exposed to that, because of the tendency to settle in immigrant enclave areas. And in fact another irony in all of this is that there are many scholars who attribute the subculture of violence and honor of violence in American society to Scottish-Irish dueling culture that was brought over centuries ago. Now, that's also sort of a speculative hypothesis, but there are a lot of people who buy into it, the notion that the culture of violence is brought over by the white immigrants, the Scots-Irish, who settled in the South, South Carolina and other areas, and then diffused into the inner city.