Lawmakers Find It Easy to Blame Immigrants for Crime
By: Gerri L. Elder
For anti-immigration activists, it is easy to point out an instance in which an illegal immigrant has committed a crime and therefore conclude that immigrants are criminals.
The Salt Lake Tribune recently reported that legislators in Utah are currently lobbying the Department of Homeland Security in an effort to get 22 more immigration agents in the state. This action is in response to a crime wave that has been blamed on illegal immigrants in Utah.
Two letters have been sent to the Department of Homeland Security by Utah's legislators, both including a long list of the lawmaker's signatures. The text of the letters reportedly allege that illegal immigrants are responsible for a wide variety of crimes in the state, including violent crimes, human smuggling, gang activity, sex offenses, money laundering and drug trafficking.
In one of the letters, the lawmakers say, "Numerous illegal aliens are committing crimes in Utah communities with virtual impunity." However, as the editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune points out, criminals in Utah are arrested, prosecuted and punished regardless of their immigration status. The lawmakers seem to be telling the Department of Homeland Security that illegal immigrants are running wild in the state without fear of having their alleged crimes investigated or ever being arrested.
The jails in Utah are full, as they are across the nation. The legislators in Utah tell the Department of Homeland Security that they cannot continue to let "this problem" escalate. Somehow they have missed the news that more than 1 in 100 Americans are now in jail in the United States and "this problem" is not attributed to the immigrant population.
The letters contain crime statistics from the Utah Department of public safety; however these crime statistics do not include data about what percentage of crime in the state is committed by illegal immigrants.
While Utah legislators are quick to place the blame for increased crime rates on illegal immigrants, Reuters recently reported that a California a study has concluded that immigrants in California actually commit less crime than U.S. citizens. California is the most populous state in the country, but Utah would have the Department of Homeland Security believe that things are drastically different in Utah than they are in California.
The study of California by the Public Policy Institute of California crime found that the notion that illegal immigrants are a threat to public safety is unfounded. It was reported that in California, men born in the United States are incarcerated at a rate more than 2.5 times higher than men born in foreign countries.
The report plainly stated that public safety would not be improved by cracking down on immigration by limiting the number of immigrants that can enter the country, requiring higher educational levels to obtain visas, or by increasing penalties against criminal immigrants.
While it may be the easy way out for lawmakers to point the finger at immigrants and blame them for crime and economic problems, the fact is that there is no data to back up these allegations. As the study in California proves, there are certainly statistics that dispute the claims of these lawmakers.