Methodology
This brief uses data from the Texas Department of Public Safety
(DPS) obtained through a Public Information Act (PIA)
request.6 The Texas DPS data separately show the
number of convictions and arrests of illegal and legal immigrants
for 44 and 46 different crimes, respectively, in the state of Texas
by year from January 1, 2011, to November 15, 2017. This brief
reports the conviction and arrest rates for each subpopulation of
natives, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and all immigrants
combined. This allows for a comparison of conviction and arrest
rates between these subpopulations. This brief additionally
displays conviction and arrest rates by select crimes.
Texas has these data because its law enforcement agencies
cooperate with federal immigration enforcement authorities at the
Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that check the biometrics of
arrestees in the state.7 The Texas DPS keeps the results of these
DHS checks that then allow a more direct look at immigrant
criminality by immigration status.8 The DPS data released by the PIA
request revealed slightly more arrests in 2015 than were reported
by another publicly available DPS report for the same
year.9 The quality of the Texas DPS data is
excellent and, if it errs, it is likely to overcount the
convictions and arrests of illegal immigrants because it counts
more total arrests than another DPS source.
This brief reports the conviction and arrest rates for 2015
because that is the most recent year for which estimates are
available for the sizes of the legal immigrant, native-born,
and illegal immigrant populations residing in the state of
Texas.10 The numbers in this brief do not
represent the total number of criminal immigrants in the state of
Texas in 2015, but merely the number of convictions and arrests of
illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and natives. There were
22,797,819 native-born Americans, 1,758,199 illegal immigrants, and
2,913,096 legal immigrants living in Texas in 2015.11 In that
year, natives made up about 83 percent of the Texas population,
illegal immigrants about 6.4 percent of the population, and legal
immigrants about 10.6 percent. The conviction and arrest rates for
the entire period of January 1, 2011, through November 15, 2017,
are nearly identical to those of 2015, so the choice of year makes
little difference. The DPS data that this brief analyzes are for
all arrests and convictions that occurred in the year 2015,
regardless of the year in which the crime was actually
committed.
Controlling for the size of the population is essential to
comparing relative conviction and arrest rates between groups.
Thus, government agencies generally report the conviction rate as
the number of convictions per 100,000 members of that particular
group.12 The three subgroups this brief analyzes
are illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born
Americans. It is important to note that the Texas DPS data report
the number of convictions and arrests, not the number of
people actually convicted or arrested. For instance, if a
Texas court convicts a single person of two different offenses or
of the same offense twice, then the Texas DPS data will count that
as two convictions.
Texas is an ideal state to study criminality by immigration
status for multiple reasons: the state of Texas borders Mexico; it
has a large illegal immigrant population; it is a politically
conservative state governed by Republicans; in 2015 it did not have
jurisdictions that limited its cooperation with federal immigration
enforcement; and it has a law and order reputation for severely
enforcing its criminal laws.
Convictions
Natives were convicted of 409,708 crimes, illegal immigrants
were convicted of 15,803 crimes, and legal immigrants were
convicted of 17,785 crimes in Texas in 2015. Thus, there were 1,797
criminal convictions of natives for every 100,000 natives, 899
criminal convictions of illegal immigrants for every 100,000
illegal immigrants, and 611 criminal convictions of legal
immigrants for every 100,000 legal immigrants (Figure 1). As a
percentage of their respective populations, there were 50 percent
fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of
native-born Americans in Texas in 2015. The criminal conviction
rate for legal immigrants was about 66 percent below the
native-born rate.
Homicides supposedly committed by illegal immigrants garner the
most public attention.13 On November 30, 2017, a San Francisco
jury acquitted José Inés García Zárate, an illegal immigrant from
Mexico previously deported five times, of murdering Kate
Steinle.14 Her tragic killing galvanized public
support for harsher immigration enforcement and the construction of
a border wall and provided anecdotal evidence for then-candidate
Trump’s claim that illegal immigrants are responsible for a large
number of crimes in the United States.15
There were 785 total homicide convictions in Texas in 2015. Of
those, native-born Americans were convicted of 709 homicides,
illegal immigrants were convicted of 46 homicides, and legal
immigrants were convicted of 30 homicides. The homicide conviction
rate for native-born Americans was 3.1 per 100,000, 2.6 per 100,000
for illegal immigrants, and 1 per 100,000 for legal immigrants
(Figure 2). In 2015, homicide conviction rates for illegal and
legal immigrants were 16 percent and 67 percent below those of
natives, respectively.
Illegal immigrants made up about 6.4 percent of the Texas
population in 2015 but only accounted for 5.9 percent of all
homicide convictions. Legal immigrants made up 10.6 percent of the
Texas population but accounted for only 3.8 percent of homicide
convictions. Native-born Americans made up 83 percent of the Texas
population but accounted for 90.3 percent of all homicide
convictions (Figure 3).
Commentators also disproportionately blame immigrants for sex
assaults and sex offenses.16 This brief combines sexual assault and
sexual offense into the criminal category of sex crimes. There were
28.6 sex crime convictions of illegal immigrants per 100,000 in
2015, about 7.9 percent fewer than for native-born Americans in the
same year (Figure 4). The sex crime conviction rate for legal
immigrants was 69 percent below that of natives. There were many
fewer sex crime convictions against immigrants, including illegal
immigrants, than against native-born Americans in Texas in
2015.
There were fewer larceny convictions of illegal immigrants and
legal immigrants than there were of natives in 2015. There were 267
larceny convictions of natives per 100,000 while there were only
about 62 convictions against illegal immigrants and 74 against
legal immigrants (Figure 5). The larceny conviction rate for
illegal immigrants was 77 percent below that of natives. This is
one of the few crimes where the criminal conviction rate of legal
immigrants is greater than it is for illegal immigrants.
Arrests
Some commentators argue that there is “immigrant privilege” in
the criminal justice system whereby immigrants face fewer criminal
convictions even though they are arrested for more
crimes.17 However, the arrest rate for illegal
immigrants is lower than for natives overall but higher for just a
handful of individual crimes-very similar to the conviction rate.
Lower arrest rates for illegal immigrants overturns the “immigrant
privilege” hypothesis.
In 2015, Texas police made 815,689 arrests of natives, 37,776
arrests of illegal immigrants, and 20,323 arrests of legal
immigrants. For every 100,000 people in each subgroup, there were
3,578 arrests of natives, 2,149 arrests of illegal immigrants, and
698 arrests of legal immigrants (Table 1). The arrest rate for
illegal immigrants was 40 percent below that of native-born
Americans. The arrest rate for all immigrants and legal immigrants
was 65 percent and 81 percent below that of native-born Americans,
respectively.
Per 100,000 people in their respective groups, there were more
arrests of natives for homicide, sex crimes, and larceny than there
were arrests of illegal immigrants.
Conclusion
The homicide conviction rate for illegal immigrants was 16
percent below that of native-born Americans in Texas in 2015. The
conviction rates for illegal immigrants were 7.9 percent and 77
percent below that of native-born Americans for sex crimes and
larceny, respectively. For all criminal convictions in Texas in
2015, illegal immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 50 percent
below that of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had a
criminal conviction rate 66 percent below that of native-born
Americans.
Notes
1 “Executive Order: Enhancing
Public Safety in the Interior of the United States,” Executive
Order of the President, January 25, 2017, https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united-states/;
and Maha Ahmed, “Jeff Sessions Gives In and Sends Federal Funds to
Sanctuary Cities,” Mother Jones, November 20, 2017.
2 Lesley Stahl, “President-Elect
Trump Speaks to a Divided Country on 60 Minutes,” CBS
News, November 13, 2016.
3 See Daniel P. Mears, “The
Immigration-Crime Nexus: Toward an Analytic Framework for Assessing
and Guiding Theory, Research, and Policy,” Sociological
Perspectives 44, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 1-19; Kristin F. Butcher
and Anne Morrison Piehl, “The Role of Deportation in the
Incarceration of Immigrants,” in Issues in the Economics of
Immigration, ed. George J. Borjas (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000): 351-86; Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison
Piehl, “Why Are Immigrants’ Incarceration Rates So Low? Evidence on
Selective Immigration, Deterrence, and Deportation,” NBER Working
Paper no. 13229, National Bureau of Economic Research, July 2007;
Jacob I. Stowell et al., “Immigration and the Recent Violent Crime
Drop in the United States: A Pooled, Cross-Sectional Time-Series
Analysis of Metropolitan Areas,” Criminology 47, no. 3
(2009): 889-928; Lesley Williams Reid et al., “The
Immigration-Crime Relationship: Evidence across U.S. Metropolitan
Areas,” Social Science Research 34, no. 4 (2005): 757-80;
Matthew T. Lee, Ramiro Martinez, and Richard Rosenfeld, “Does
Immigration Increase Homicide?,” Sociological Quarterly
42, no. 4 (2001): 559-80; Butcher and Piehl, “The Role of
Deportation in the Incarceration of Immigrants”; Butcher and Piehl,
“Why Are Immigrants’ Incarceration Rates So Low?”; Walter A. Ewing,
Daniel E. Martinez, and Ruben G. Rumbaut, “The Criminalization of
Immigration in the United States,” American Immigration Council
Special Report, July 2015; and Alex Nowrasteh, “Immigration and
Crime-What the Research Says,” Cato at Liberty, July 14,
2015, https://www.cato.org/blog/immigration-crime-what-research-says.
4 Michelangelo Landgrave and Alex
Nowrasteh, “Criminal Immigrants: Their Numbers, Demographics, and
Countries of Origin,” Cato Institute Immigration Research and
Policy Brief, no. 1, March 15, 2017, https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-reform-bulletin/criminal-immigrants-their-numbers-demographics-countries;
Nicole Cobler, “Less Than 5 Percent of Texas Prison Inmates Are
Undocumented,” Texas Tribune, February 19, 2016; and Laura
J. Hickman and Marika J. Suttorp, “Are Deportable Aliens a Unique
Threat to Public Safety? Comparing the Recidivism of Deportable and
Nondeportable Aliens,” Criminology and Public Policy 7,
no. 1 (2008): 59-82.
5 Thomas J. Miles and Adam B.
Cox, “Does Immigration Enforcement Reduce Crime? Evidence from
Secure Communities,” Journal of Law and Economics 57, no.
4 (2014): 937-73; and Elina Treyger, Aaron Chalfin, and Charles
Loeffler, “Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime,”
Criminology & Public Policy 13, no. 2 (2014):
285-322.
6 “Public Information Act,” Texas
Department of Public Safety, http://www.dps.texas.gov/pia.htm;
and “Texas Criminal Alien Arrest Data,” Texas Department of Public
Safety,
https://www.dps.texas.gov/administration/crime_records/pages/txCriminalAlienStatistics.htm.
This information is available on email request made to Alex
Nowrasteh at anowrasteh [at] cato.org.
7 ICE News Releases, “ICE ‘Secure
Communities’ Program Now Activated in All Texas Counties,”
September 29, 2010,
https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/ice-secure-communities-program-now-activated-all-texas-counties;
and “Texas Criminal Alien Arrest Data,” Texas Department of Public
Safety,
https://www.dps.texas.gov/administration/crime_records/pages/txCriminalAlienStatistics.htm.
8 Michelangelo Landgrave and Alex
Nowrasteh, “Criminal Immigrants: Their Numbers, Demographics, and
Countries of Origin.”
9 Texas Department of Public
Safety, “Crime in Texas: 2015,” Chapter 9, 2015, https://www.dps.texas.gov/administration/crime_records/pages/crimestatistics.htm.
10 Center for Migration Studies,
“State-Level Unauthorized Population and Eligible-to-Naturalized
Estimates,” Texas, 2015; and American Community Survey, “Selected
Characteristics of the Native and Foreign-Born Populations,” Table
S0501 1-Year Estimates, 2015.
11 Center for Migration Studies,
“State-Level Unauthorized Population and Eligible-to-Naturalized
Estimates,” Texas, 2015; and American Community Survey, “Selected
Characteristics of the Native and Foreign-Born Populations,” Table
S0501 1-Year Estimates, 2015.
12 Bureau of Justice Statistics,
“Crime and Justice in the United States and in England and Wales,
1981-1996,” https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/html/cjusew96/cpp.cfm.13 John Wildermuth and Rachel
Swan, “Conservatives Let SF Have It over Verdict in Kate Steinle
Case,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 30, 2017.
14 Vivian Ho, “Kate Steinle
Trial: García Zárate Acquitted in San Francisco Pier Killing,”
San Francisco Chronicle, December 1, 2017.
15 Donald J. Trump, “Transcript:
Donald Trump’s Full Immigration Speech, Annotated,” Los Angeles
Times, August 31, 2017,
http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-donald-trump-immigration-speech-transcript-20160831-snap-htmlstory.html.
16 Ann Coulter, ¡Adios,
America! (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2015); and Ann
Coulter, “ ‘Immigrant Privilege’ Drives Child Rape Epidemic,”
Townhall, March 8, 2017.
17 Ann Coulter, “ ‘Immigrant
Privilege’ Drives Child Rape Epidemic,” Townhall, March 8,
2017.
