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Immigrant Crime: Who Wants To Know?

By  David Walsh

Recently, while exploring the incidence of immigrant crime and its impact on the US, I was stymied. Not by the dearth of information: it’s there if you really want it. What was troubling was the lengths to which people who rely on such statistics (here, gang investigators and the INS) will go to avoid discussing them. Some officials were fearful, some indifferent, others seemed to question my motives. It all seemed to mirror the big media’s tendency to skirt the issue.

Richard H. Ward, Dean and Director of the Center of Criminal Justice at Texas’s Sam Houston State University (and an ex-NYPD detective), recently published an interesting study in Criminal Justice 2000 called “The Internationalization of Criminal Justice” about the importation of crime: narco-terrorism, street crime and gangs, home invasions, credit-card and staged-accident scams, identity theft, and white slavery.

“Globalization,” Ward observed in his introduction, “is producing ... new challenges for criminal justice practitioners and researchers.... To the law enforcement community, particularly at the local level, global crime is frequently linked to illegal aliens” (now officially recorded as entering the US at a rate of some 25,000 each month, and probably far higher in actuality). At the same time, “criminal activity by ... legal immigrants ... has grown considerably.”

Despite this, though, the watchword in the States is… accommodation. Police, intelligence agencies, the courts, parole officers, social workers, and health professionals—as well as Americans at large—all must accustom themselves, it seems, to immigrant crime.

The dimensions of the problem loom so large, Ward suggested, that even basic American freedoms may be abridged in the name of the greater good.  What most caught my attention in his article, though, was a passage having to do with disincentives to investigation and enforcement.

Some of these already hobble the police and the INS. “In areas with large immigrant communities,” Ward found, “political pressure is frequently applied to discourage immigration authorities and law enforcement from ‘searching out’ illegals.”

In an interview with Prof. Ward, I asked about this statement—a confirmation of something long suspected though rarely discussed in the media.  He began by suggesting that several factors are at work here.

“Over the past decade, in many cases from a criminal justice standpoint [officials] have stepped back and said, ‘Hey, we’re just not going to look at this.’" (Immigrant crime, that is.) “It’s a sign of the times; the feeling, you know, that everybody makes mistakes [like crossing the border illegally?], and there’s an unwillingness to apply more law enforcement.” In a further reflection of current thinking, Ward added, “‘Let’s not cause any problems for our neighbors (and trading partners)--particularly Mexico.’" He declined to be specific, but suggested that officialdom exercises - quite properly - an overweening caution in discussing the matter.

Yes, but although it’s clear that only a minority of newcomers is involved in crime (“less than one-in-ten,” Ward guesses), aren’t We The People entitled to know the extent of it?

Well, no—that’s not politically feasible. “There is no way to sort out the numbers of foreign criminals,” Ward says. “That would take raiding sweat shops and the like, and that gets into how far you should go.” (To liberals, of course, the very term “raid” is ominous.)

Then, of course, there’s the ultimate question:

Why bother to study immigrant crime, anyway? Even with upwards of fifteen million illegals in the US today, “very few people care - as long as there are jobs.” 

When I suggested to Prof. Ward that this laissez faire attitude towards foreign crime was shared by our government, he agreed with me. “That’s probably a good word. Unemployment is so low in the United States that very few people are paying attention....  An example is the large numbers of Asians, especially Chinese illegals, who no one [in the criminal justice system] seems to be paying much attention to.”  How come?  Oh—“They’re not much involved in crime, or it’s Chinese-on-Chinese crime.”

In any event, Ward said, the crooks melt into the immigrant community where they’re sometimes sheltered, but in any case untracked by police, INS, or other authorities. Unnoticed or not, Ward estimates that over 100,000 Chinese alone are smuggled into the country every year. Invariably, they end up as “slave laborers” for the Triads, or Chinese mafia.

As for Latinos, by far the largest contributor to the U.S.’s newcomer population, Ward quipped, “There’s this juxtaposition: people who want to bring [immigrants] in for farming, and others, like some ranchers who want to get rid of them.” (While trespassing across ranch land, immigrants sometimes steal equipment and damage private property.)

But Professor Ward turned somber when the discussion turned to shifts in public sentiment during an economic downturn. The Border Patrol, entrusted with guarding America’s frontiers, is “poorly funded” in spite of the booming economy. Ward endorses beefing up the BP with funds, plenty more personnel, better pay and equipment—improvements he thinks are unlikely, however.  Washington gives “a wink and nod” to the porous border, since “the government relies on foreign workers and their cheap labor.” And so the U.S. Border Patrol, the professor commented with notable understatement, “finds itself in the unenviable position of trying to curtail what some view as a monumental problem.”

So what about foreign terrorists, presumably a major concern of this nation? Can’t they take advantage of the same lax border controls as the average Mexican peasant? Ward agreed they might, but that “that’s a different situation.”  (He couldn’t tell me just how different.)

A further problem in controlling immigrant crime is the “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” phenomenon: To most Americans, the foreign population barely registers, let alone the criminals among them. An important reason for this, Ward notes, is that immigrants usually victimize their own people. Hispanic crooks, for instance, “see their people as walking ATM machines” owing to their avoidance of banks and police (this means they’re likely to carry large sums of cash on their persons).

And then, of course, there’s the fear factor: In today’s political climate, Ward acknowledged, truth-telling is easily confused with insensitivity or “hate.” Other difficulties include record-keeping on foreign criminals—or the lack of it. “Each state keeps different kind of statistics, and it’s really a killer to get an accurate picture.”

So how does the United States protect its sovereignty against foreign dangers?  Besides the Border Patrol upgrades, Professor Ward suggests, “We should create better economic conditions in the other countries. On the criminal side, we’re never going to be able to close the borders with Mexico very effectively unless we make a very strong commitment to doing that.” (Experts, you need to understand, are in the habit of thinking big.) “Once again, quite frankly, we don’t know who’s coming across the border.” (You said a mouthful, professor!)

Finally, this criminal justice expert suggested how the problem of alien crime could lead to possible encroachments by the federal government. (“Indeed,” he had written in his article, “a paradox of more internationalization may well be a lessening of individual rights and the autonomy of local governments.”)

Now, he told me, “We are going to see more emphasis by the federal government stepping in on this [crime problem].  You’ve already got the drug czar ....  Perhaps mass fingerprinting is next.” (Not fingerprinting for immigrants only, but for the American public as a whole.) As for the states and their police forces, we may expect to see them “federalized” in years to come. (So much to look forward to.) 

So there you have it: the safety of the commonweal - and even basic national security - all but trumped by the government’s fears of identity politics and the escalating power of social activists.

Not to mention the timidity of the “experts” who advise and direct our elected public officials, in Congress and elsewhere.

David Walsh is a freelance writer/photographer (Click here to view his work) in the Washington D.C. area. Among his recent articles is an exposé of Hispanic drivers’ disproportionately poor safety record.

June 18, 2001