The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States

The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States by Walter A. Ewing, Daniel E. Martinez, and Ruben G. Rumbaut Immigration Policy Center Special Report, American Immigration Council June 2015 (in press) Introduction In November 2013, NPR reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had been instructed by Congress since 2009 to fill 34,000 beds in detention facilities across the country with immigrant detainees every day. It was immediately apparent that this sort of inmate quota would never fly if applied to native-born prisoners. As the NPR story puts it: “Imagine your city council telling the police department how many people it had to keep in jail each night.” 1 Clearly, such a concept has nothing to do with fighting crime or protecting the public. But when it comes to the detention (and deportation) of immigrants, very different standards of justice and reason are at work. For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime. 2 This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education. In other words, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are not “criminals” by any commonly accepted definition of the term. For this reason, harsh immigration policies are not effective in fighting crime. Unfortunately, immigration policy is frequently shaped more by fear and stereotype than by empirical evidence, which is partly why immigrants are often treated like dangerous criminals by the U.S. immigration system. More precisely, immigrants have the stigma of “criminality” ascribed to them by an ever-evolving assortment of laws and immigration-enforcement mechanisms. From the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) to Operation Streamline (launched in 2005), immigrants are being defined more and more as threats. 3 Whole new classes of “felonies” have been created which apply only to immigrants, deportation has become a punishment for even minor offenses, and policies aimed at trying to end unauthorized immigration have been made more punitive rather than more rational and practical. In short, immigrants themselves are being criminalized. 4 Moreover, as the procedural and substantive law that comprises what has come to be called “crimmigration” law reimagines noncitizens as criminals and security risks, immigration law enforcement has increasingly adopted the securitized approach of criminal law enforcement. 5 As prominent immigration scholar Douglas Massey has written with regard to the plight of unauthorized immigrants in particular, “not since the days of slavery have so many residents of the United States lacked the most basic social, economic, and human rights.” 6