…from “‘Immigrants Bring Crime’ Is a Myth,” New America Media, February 22, 2007:
Among the many troubling aspects of the public debate over immigration is the power of myths over facts. One of the most enduring myths about immigration, despite literally decades of evidence to the contrary, is the belief that immigrants are more likely to commit crime than the native-born. This myth is so widespread and unquestioned that it has been the catalyst for scores of local governments to consider anti-immigrant ordinances over the past year. These calls to crack down on undocumented immigrants, the employers who hire them and the landlords who rent to them, are framed in part as “anti-crime” ordinances. The city council of Hazleton, Pennsylvania, for instance, passed an ordinance last September claiming that “illegal immigration leads to higher crime rates” and that the council therefore must protect legal residents of the city from “crimes committed by illegal aliens.” Because most of the undocumented immigrants in Hazleton and other communities throughout the United States are young men from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, and elsewhere in Latin America, who have little money or formal education, it is assumed that they are more likely to commit crimes than the native-born. Government and academic studies, however, have demonstrated repeatedly for over a century that immigrants actually are less likely to commit crimes than the native-born. Even though immigration has increased dramatically over the past decade and a half, the crime rate in the United States has declined.…
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…from “Poverty is Still Home-Grown,” Washington Post, September 8, 2007:
In his Sept. 5 op-ed, “Importing Poverty,” Robert J. Samuelson made a common yet fatal mistake when it comes to the supposed link between immigration and poverty. Immigrants are no more responsible for poverty than are the native-born working poor. Demonizing the foreign-born workers who fill so many of the essential yet low-paying jobs that fewer native-born workers are interested in won't do anything to raise the minimum wage, expand health insurance coverage or implement any of the other policies that might alleviate poverty. Immigrants aren't bringing poverty to the United States. Rather, they are coming to fill jobs that have always been performed by workers at the economic margins.…
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…from Enforcement Without Reform: How Current U.S. Immigration Policies Undermine National Security and the Economy (Julian Samora Research Institute, Michigan State University, March 2008):
It is sometimes said that the hallmark of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. This maxim succinctly describes the U.S. government's long-standing approach to the problem of undocumented immigration. Since the mid-1980s, the federal government has tried repeatedly, without success, to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants to the United States with all sorts of immigration-enforcement initiatives: deploying more and more agents, fences, flood lights, aircraft, cameras, and sensors along the southwest border with Mexico—increasing the number of worksite raids and arrests conducted throughout the country—expanding detention facilities to accommodate the hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants apprehended each year—and creating new bureaucratic procedures to expedite the return of detained immigrants to their home countries. Despite the enormous fiscal, economic, and human costs of these measures, they have yet to make a demonstrable dent in the number of undocumented immigrants entering the country.…
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…from “Beyond Border Enforcement: Enhancing National Security Through Immigration Reform,” Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy, Summer 2007:
Since 9/11 the watchword in the debate over immigration reform has been “security.” As a result, most policymakers and pundits now approach the subject of immigration largely from a law-enforcement perspective. That is, the focus is how best to fortify U.S. borders so as to prevent the illicit entry into the country of terrorists or weapons of mass destruction. This concern has been especially acute in the case of the U.S.-Mexico border, across which hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants enter the United States undetected each year. However, the current border-enforcement strategy, which tends to lump together terrorists and undocumented jobseekers from abroad as groups to be kept out, ignores the causes of undocumented immigration and fuels the expansion of the people-smuggling networks through which a foreign terrorist might enter the country. As a decade and a half of failed border-control initiatives have illustrated, law-enforcement efforts alone are not sufficient to achieve security. As long as U.S. immigration policies remain unresponsive to the economic forces which drive immigration, U.S. national security will be continually undermined by a system that sends the dual messages “Keep Out” and “Help Wanted” to the immigrant workers upon whom large sectors of the U.S. economy depend.…
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