incarceration

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 6); Immigrants, Crime and Incarceration: Another Mostly Local Cost and a Causal Tangle.

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events, Liberty , , , , , ,

There exists a widespread impression, deliberately fed by some conservative media and sometimes by President Trump himself, to the effect that illegal immigrants are especially prone to crime, and to violent crime. By extension, by illogical implication, immigrants in general are tarred with the same brush.

Immigrant crime agitates for different reasons that are not always disentangled from one another. First, there is the general social disorganization that any crime causes and the worsening of the quality of life it entails. Second, mostly youthful immigrants could have the power to reverse the general decline in crime that accompanies the aging of American society. They might be the agent of a step backward for American society. Third, capturing, trying, and incarcerating anyone is very expensive, more expensive than schooling, for example. Immigrant crime in general is especially apt to disturb emotionally because it seems to involve a kind of crass ungratefulness: I let you into my living room, or you enter while I am not paying attention, and you show your appreciation by stealing the silverware, and worse.

Belief in the criminality of immigrants as a group is not necessarily the result of a kind of emotional prejudice. Immigrants are predominantly young, ill-educated, and poor, all known ingredients of criminal propensity in any context. (To my surprise, current immigrants are not predominantly male, although maleness is a strong factor of criminality.) So, if immigrants to the US are like just about every population of the same age, income, and education ever studied, they should exhibit a higher crime rate than the native-born population that is, on the average, better educated, more prosperous, and, especially, considerably older.

It’s difficult to figure out the basic truths about immigration and crime because gross miscounting by partisan journalists is common. For instance, in his 2018 article in Reason on a report based on 2009 figures, Alex Nowrasteh shows how easy it is to make horrendous but simple mistakes of enumeration: Counting single events of incarceration as if they were individual immigrants, for example, as if illegal immigrants could not be repeat offenders. (“Restrictionists Are Misleading You About Immigrant Crime Rates.” Reason, Feb. 1, 2018.)

I explicitly do not accuse the authors cited below of such miscounting.

In his 2006 article in Liberty, Cox showed that about 2.6 % of inmates in federal prison and an astonishing 12% of people incarcerated in local jails and prisons were illegal immigrants in 2002. That’s 14.6% of all persons then incarcerated in the US. The highest estimate of the number of illegal aliens I could locate for any year is 15 million. With that estimate, conservatively, incarcerated illegal aliens would be about 5% of the then US population of 293 million. Roughly, illegal aliens, according to Cox, were thus incarcerated in 2002 at almost three times the rate of their occurrence in the general population. This rate did not include incarcerations for merely being illegally present in the US (which must have been a small number since that was only a misdemeanor). Cox’s study is based on figures for only one year for the whole country.

At any rate, Cox’s incarceration figures concern mostly illegal aliens. It’s not clear whether illegal immigrants’ propensity to commit crimes is similar to the corresponding propensity of legal immigrants, nor if their crimes are similar. Legal and illegals may come from different countries and regions. Even if they come from the same places, they may issue from different classes in their societies of origin. Even if from the same places and same classes, they may constitute different samples of the populations of origin from the standpoint of motivation and thus, of personal psychology. It takes different virtues to arrange for legal immigration via whatever path, on the one hand, and to swim the Rio Grande, or coolly to overstay one’s visa, on the other. These different virtues could easily be associated with different levels of different criminal tendencies. Finally, legal and illegal immigrants have different incentives to break the law or not, the latter being in a good position to not draw attention to themselves. That’s at least until the sanctuary movement.

A study published by the libertarian Cato Institute in February 2015 examined criminal conviction data provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety. It found that native-born residents were much more likely to be convicted of a crime than immigrants in the country either legally or illegally. For all crimes together, the legal immigrants’ score was less than one third that of the native-born. The difference in the likelihood of being convicted of homicide, specifically, was very large between legal immigrants and the native-born. The former were 15 times less likely to be convicted of homicide. Even illegal immigrants were only 70% as likely as the native born to be convicted of homicide. (“Two charts demolish the notion that immigrants here illegally commit more crime,” Christopher Ingraham, Washington Post on-line accessed circa June 28 2018.)

Note that the Cato Institute study is for one state only and for only one year. Cox’s figures cited above are also for one year only but for the whole country.

It’s not obvious how one should relate these contradictory sets of findings to one another. (There are many more such studies. I chose two researchers on my side of the political fence that seemed to me to have worked with seriousness.) First, figures about comparatively rare events such as homicide are notoriously unstable. The corresponding homicide figures for 2004 or for 2014 might be very different. Moreover, both sets of figures, Cox’s and Cato Institute’s use the heterogeneous categories “legal immigrants” and “illegal aliens.” To generalize from their findings requires making the silent assumption that the composition of both is stable from year to year. This assumption is unwarranted. Nothing regulates the composition of illegal immigration and little insures that the composition of legal immigration will be similar from year to year. The varying numbers of refugees alone could sway the legal figures one way or the other.

Here is a realistic scenario: For a period of a few years, both immigration flows consist mostly of rural, mountain Mexicans from rural areas where crime is scarce. In a subsequent and contiguous period, a large flood is added, through both refugee legal immigration and through illegal immigration, of urban Central Americans (thus, of people from some of the highest crime areas of the world). Both the frequency and the nature of immigrant crime may change swiftly as a result  of this sudden (and realistic) change in  the composition of immigration, legal or illegal, or both. The composition of legal immigration may change drastically in a single year because of the influx of refugees from a single location hitherto unrepresented in the US. The composition of illegal immigration may also change suddenly because of a disaster in a region that the American federal government does not recognize as a legitimate source of refugee status. It’s hazardous to extrapolate from one period to any other period. Hence both Cox’s and Cato Institute’s findings may be correct but, at the extreme, each of them for one year only.

It’s also risky to extrapolate from one domestic location, for example, Texas, to another, for example, the whole United States. Here is one reason among others why it is so: The (innocent) rural mountain Mexicans I mention above are likely to move to the Central Valley of California and to similarly agricultural areas in Florida. Crime-prone Central Americans, on the other hand, may seek their fortune in the more familiar big cities anywhere, including, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. In this imaginary scenario, immigrant crime in Texas (Houston and Dallas, per chance) may be grossly unrepresentative of immigrant crime anywhere else in the US.

Finally, as Cox pointed out to me in a personal communication, the comparison category, “native-born” is itself heterogeneous with respect to crime. The rates for African-American  – most of whom are native-born – are several times as high as others’. Perhaps, the native-born would far better for incidence of crime if blacks were excluded from the comparison. I suspect this is true but I don’t know according to what theoretical principle, this exclusion should be made.

[Editor’s note: In case you missed it, here is Part 5]

Legal Immigration Into the United States (Part 5); The Net Contribution of Immigrants: An Attempt at Critical Quantification

Jacques Delacroix Culture, Current Events , , , , ,

In his October 2006 article in Liberty, (“Immigration: Yes, No, and Maybe” by Richard Fields, Stephen Cox, and Bruce Ramsey), Cox tries to summarize the net cost that (then) current immigrants impose on American society by working out a quantitative example. He stages an imaginary but realistic (Mexican) immigrant family of five living in Los Angeles – two parents and three minor children. He assigns reasonable earnings to the parents and sets those against the probable costs that the whole family imposes in the form of normal local and other services. He arrives at the conclusion that the family annually costs American society 38,900 2006 dollars. (I agree with Cox that this may be a conservative estimate. That would be about 48,000 June 2018 dollars, using the CPI Inflation Calculator of the Bureau of Labor Statistics).

To gauge the real magnitude of the overall normal costs legal immigrants  thus impose on American society, let’s suppose further that all of the 2016 legal immigration is composed of Cox’s families of five. That’s 240,000 such families. The aggregate excess of their social costs over their earnings is 48,000 x 240,000 = 11.52 billion dollars. As a percentage of 2016 GDP, this figure is less than 7/10,000 (seven over ten thousand – 2016 GDP from CountryEconomy.Com).

Now, let’s suppose that Cox was too conservative by one half in his estimate of the cost his family imposes on American society. This would imply that the legal immigrant families that compose all of 2016 immigration cost American society an amount that is like 14/10,000. The numerator in this last estimate includes only legal immigrants. Let’s suppose further that the number of illegal immigrants for the year of reference equals the number of legal ones and that they cost the same and contribute the same as legal immigrants. The cost that all immigrants impose on American society is then approximately 28/10,000 or about 1/3 of one per cent of GDP. If you assume that illegal immigrants earn only half as much as legal immigrants, the net cost of immigration overall goes up correspondingly. It’s still not much. My point is this: In the worst case scenario I can conjure, the net cost that immigrants impose on American society is very low. It’s of the order of 12 million Americans buying a $10 lottery ticket at Nine/Eleven every payday.

This is still certainly an overestimation, for two reasons. One, this scenario is the extreme, limiting case. There is, of course, zero chance that the total legal immigration in any one year is composed entirely of the kind of families of five Cox describes. Among the immigrants, as with nearly all immigration everywhere, there must be a preponderance of healthy young men and young women without children. This happens through self-selection: emigration is very difficult. It requires courage and even a solid dose of unrealism; children are a big impediment in this respect. But, in most cases, younger people without children must easily contribute more than they cost American society because they land all raised up and ready to work (as I said). The exceptions concern those who fall seriously sick– uncommon among the young – and those who end up in jail or prison. The latter is not a rare occurrence among the young in general, among young males in particular. As I said, I deal below with the particular cost of incarcerating immigrants.

The other imaginary limiting case is this: Among the 1,200,000 immigrants in 2016, there is a single family of five as described by Cox and the balance is made up of vigorous young women and young men who never become sick and never transgress the law. In that other limiting case, immigrants are almost certainly a net economic boon to American society. I don’t know where the reality lies and it may change from year to year. It’s doable research which, I think, has not been done.

The second reason why the figure of 28/10,000 is probably an overestimation, or why it leads to fallacious inferences, has to do with life cycles. First, there will probably be a period during the family’s life when the children will be grown and capable of working while the parents themselves are working, undisturbed by family obligations. During that period, three or four, or all five immigrants will in all likelihood contribute more than they take from American society, in spite of their low qualifications. This sweet spot may vanish when the parents reach Medicare and Social Security age. In the meantime, several family members will have contributed to the relevant social funds; one or more of the children will too, probably for 30 years or more. Hence, whether the family of five receives a net benefit or impose a net cost over a longer, trans-generational period depends on actuarial calculations that neither Cox nor I have performed.

I hasten to add that it’s quite possible that such actuarial calculations, performed with real numbers, would still show the five in my chosen family as perpetrating a net cost on American society. To be thorough, one would have to take into account two more things. One is the possibility that one of the three children will turn out to be a great, outsize contributor, like the 40% American Nobel Prize winners born abroad. Or all three. The relevant reasoning has to be trans-generational to some extent, it seems to me. Just look at the extreme imaginary scenario below.

For ten years in a row, the US admits as many immigrants as it did in 2016. That’s 12 million immigrants. Let’s assume none dies during that period and they have no children (We will see that this unrealistic assumption does not matter here.) Not one of the twelve million is able to pay his full fare. On the average, they each cost American society $20,000 there is no chance they will ever pay back, one way or another. However, one of these hapless immigrants is Steve Job’s biological father. You know the rest of this true story. Ask yourself: If it were your decision, knowing this and, and based solely on economic matters which are the stake here, would keep out all twelve million?

This quandary poses an interesting conceptual problem we keep encountering: Had Job’s biological father not accidentally made his girlfriend pregnant; had they not decided to give Steve up for adoption, would someone else have developed the personal computer with Wozniak? Without him? Would you bet on it? The truth is that American society is unusually inventive but it’s probably not the most inventive on a per capita basis. (Last time I looked, the Japanese were registering more patents than Americans – that’s per capita.) It’s also seems true that immigrants account for a disproportionate number of American innovations, including 40% of all Nobel prizes in other than literature. (And also excluding the often farcical Nobel Peace Prize.) It’s not absurd to think of American inventiveness as the happy encounter of American institutions unusually favorable to innovation with immigrant vigor. This is just a speculation, of course but how willing are you to discard it summarily?

Finally, the calculation of immigrants’ net burden imposed on American society necessarily fails to take into account real positive contributions that are difficult to quantify, more or less intangible contributions, some of which I have mentioned elsewhere. They go from Italian cuisine to my own ability to interpret some world events better than almost any native-born professor. Here is another mental experiment: Suppose a national society decided, through some process or other, to bring up the average quality of its every day food from, say English levels, to 1/3 of Italian level. The cost would be astronomical and the result would clearly constitute a significant improvement in the quality of Americans’ every day life – which is what the science of Economics is all about, of course. My point is that the fact that this felicitous result was achieved through the happenstance of immigration does not imply that its societal value is zero.

One of the highest per capita expenditures that immigrants–like every other population group over and below a certain age–impose on American society is the cost of incarceration. That cost is also mostly borne by state and local authorities, although there exists a process by which the federal government reimburses local governments for illegal immigrants incarcerated for crimes other than illegal border crossing (explained in Cox 2006). I examine below the tangled issue of the cost of immigrant incarceration.

[Editor’s note: In case you missed it, here is Part 4]