In general being in a country without valid papers gives one a strong incentive to avoid getting arrested.
In general being in a country without valid papers gives one a strong incentive to avoid getting arrested.
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/10306/silence-of-the-inn...
Per the study, crime among an illegal immigrant population fell post-amnesty in repose to increased crime reporting. Conversely, this implies that when members of a community report crime less often as a result of their immigration status - which the study finds to be the case - crime in those communities is higher than it would be otherwise.
That doesn’t hold - there could be more police near a group of people who commit the same number of crimes but because there are more police resources, there would be more arrests. There are lots of reasons this doesn’t hold.
>> saying they're less likely to commit crimes is a speculative inference
It is also undisputed though. We’ve always known illegal immigrants avoid making the kind of trouble that risks run ins with the law (i.e. there are far fewer “safe” crimes for them to commit) because the penalties are deportation.
There are indeed many factors which would cause the arrest rate to not track the crime rate. Which is why treating the arrest rate as being equivalent to the crime rate is specious.
For genpop, yes, for the specific group of illegal immigrants, no - that subset of the population has far higher penalties and penalties influence behaviour.
I think what's more likely is that a) because of the harsh collateral consequences which includes all of the existing collateral consequences of a conviction plus removal, in communities with large numbers of immigrants without valid status, members of the community may be less likely to call the police to report crimes to begin with. The undocumented or mixed-status community's hesitation to call the police is pretty well-documented, although that is unlikely to explain the entire difference documented here; or b) there's a self-selection bias where many of those prone to commit violent felonies may not find it worthwhile to go through the trouble of crossing and attempting to establish themselves under the radar here only to get caught up in a system that's punitive and would lead to removal regardless, considering that migrants seldom move here for reasons other than work opportunities anyway. But again, because of how byzantine our legal system is and how even more kafkaesque our immigration system is, it's unlikely that those without law degrees who specialize in these areas truly have anything close to full knowledge of what the consequences truly look at, so I don't think that adequately explain the difference either. Perhaps more studies on those aspects should be conducted, although this study is more or less in line with thinktank and advocacy group-conducted research from the likes of Cato and the ACLU, whose ideologically leanings are not exactly overlapping on most issues.
I do not mention this because I am against this measure (I am not), but because it makes this survey impossible to conduct accurately.