Last week, the Supreme Court decided three major immigration cases, including a ruling on the scope of the Constitution’s birthright citizenship provisions. The broader immigration debate, however, remains far from settled. Disagreements persist over everything from whether and under what circumstances foreigners should be permitted to enter the United States to how vigorously existing immigration laws should be enforced, if at all. Advocates of more restrictive immigration policies and stronger enforcement tend to rely on one rationale above all others: public safety. Indeed, the extent to which immigration affects public safety is, in many ways, the central question around which the broader debate revolves.
Keeping America safe is a question we have both thought deeply about over the years. Our thinking on such questions has been heavily influenced by some of the greatest minds in modern American criminology, such as the late scholars George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. Our approach to the policy questions we have tackled has been guided above all by data. Faced with competing policy choices, the first question we ask is: “What do the data say?”
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At the intersection of immigration and public safety, however, good data are hard to come by. Despite years of heated debate over immigration policy, we still lack clear answers to many important questions. How many serious crimes do illegal immigrants commit each year? How many calls for service involve illegal immigrants? What share of state prison populations consists of illegal immigrants? How often do criminal charges lead to deportation, and what effect does that have on recidivism? How do crime rates differ among immigrant populations—for example, between Central American men who unlawfully crossed the southern border and Eastern European men who overstayed their visas?
We have clues on the answers to some of these questions, but little more than that. For example, some activists pushing for a more lenient immigration policy argue that immigrants commit far less crime than the native population. Their arguments tend to rely on data from Texas, one of just a few states that tracks the immigration status of those charged, convicted, and incarcerated for crimes. But even their own estimates suggest that illegal immigrants are incarcerated at twice the rate of their legal counterparts.
Those projections aren’t decisive, however. For one thing, they use imperfect proxies for criminality. For another, they aggregate these extremely diverse populations, leaving us in the dark as to any differences in criminality between and among their various subgroups. Robert VerBruggen and Matthew Lilley illustrated both these points in City Journal earlier this year. As they noted, such analyses obscure important differences between incarceration rates and crime rates. Because immigrants have often spent less time in the country—and therefore had fewer opportunities to end up in prison (which takes some doing in America)—a lower incarceration rate for a particular group of immigrants doesn’t necessarily mean that that group has a lower crime rate. VerBruggen and Lilley show, for example, that after appropriate adjustments, the Somali population’s incarceration rate is nearly four times that of American-born whites.
The takeaway is straightforward: it is far more difficult than it should be to determine the extent to which illegal immigration contributes to the nation’s broader public-safety challenges. If we hope to move this debate toward resolution and reach a durable political compromise, Americans need more reliable, granular data on which to base their decisions. A good place to start would be for police departments to collect information on the immigration status of those they arrest. Yet many departments, including the NYPD, are barred from even asking arrestees about their immigration status.
The absence of such data, however, does not excuse the excesses of cities like New York when it comes to so-called “sanctuary” policies. When a suspect in custody is subject to a final order of removal or an immigration detainer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), we see no compelling rationale for shielding that person from federal authorities. After all, in such cases, the city and state’s own position is that the individual is guilty of a crime (hence the prosecution). Turning such offenders over to ICE would not only help keep them off the streets but also spare the city the costs of prosecution. It should be an easy call because it makes the public safer.
That said, reforming sanctuary policies to allow for the smooth transfer of defendants to federal immigration authorities in controlled environments would also spare communities the fallout associated with large-scale, street-level federal immigration enforcement campaigns that can lead to confusion and chaos. Federal immigration agencies are not well-suited for the complex police operations they’ve had to undertake in the face of coordinated disruption campaigns. The scenes out of Minnesota earlier this year illustrated that reality all too well.
The way forward on immigration deserves to be exhaustively debated. Americans have both a right and an obvious interest in making the best possible decision. Aiding that decision through the provision of reliable data is an essential service that too many governments have failed to deliver. As with any public safety question, history tells us that we’ll always be better off with more information, not less.