Deportations Have "No Observable Effect" On Crime Rate, Study Concludes
"Six years after the federal government opened an immigration
enforcement program intended to improve public safety, deporting hundreds of
thousands of people, many of them convicted criminals, a
new study has concluded that the program has had 'no observable effect on
the overall crime rate.'
The finding 'calls into question the longstanding assumption that deporting
noncitizens who commit crimes is an effective crime-control strategy,' said the
study, conducted by two law professors at the University of Chicago and New
York University."
Read the current
draft
Your resource for news, research, opinion and comment in the world of Criminology and Criminal Justice, brought to you by the Criminology Library, Centre for Criminology & Sociolegal Studies, University of Toronto
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immigration. Show all posts
Native-Born Americans More Likely To Commit Crimes Than Immigrants, Study Finds
A Pew Research Center report
released last week found that second generation immigrants have
“striking similarities” to their native-born, non-Hispanic white
counterparts when it comes to committing crime. In fact, when it comes
to crime rates, second-generation offenders are merely “catching up” to
the native-born population.
Biance E. Bersani conducted the study using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and found that criminality peaks at the age of 16 for 25 percent of the native-born population and a little less than 25 percent for second-generation immigrants. Meanwhile, 17 percent of 16 year old first-generation immigrants committed crime. Overall, first-generation immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than second-generation and native-born, non-Hispanic whites.
Read on...
Biance E. Bersani conducted the study using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, and found that criminality peaks at the age of 16 for 25 percent of the native-born population and a little less than 25 percent for second-generation immigrants. Meanwhile, 17 percent of 16 year old first-generation immigrants committed crime. Overall, first-generation immigrants commit crime at a lower rate than second-generation and native-born, non-Hispanic whites.
Read on...
Mexican Amusement Park Offers Fake Border Crossing Attraction
An unusual amusement park attraction in the central Mexican state of
Hidalgo offers visitors the thrills and chills of an illegal border
crossing. The attraction takes visitors through a fake United
States-Mexico border, complete with fake smugglers and fake border
patrol agents.
The aim is to dissuade would be migrants from making the trip. The coyote, or smuggler, leading this simulated illegal border crossing used the name Simon and wore a face mask. Before setting off, he addressed his charges that evening, about 40 students from a private school in Mexico City.
"Tonight we're going to talk about migration," Simon said in Spanish. "But for us it isn't just something rhetorical, but rather the opposite. Because we have endured, we have suffered, of hunger, thirst, injustice, heat, cold, we have suffered from everything."
Then, under the cover of night, Simon herded them into the woods, toward the fake frontera.
Read on...
The aim is to dissuade would be migrants from making the trip. The coyote, or smuggler, leading this simulated illegal border crossing used the name Simon and wore a face mask. Before setting off, he addressed his charges that evening, about 40 students from a private school in Mexico City.
"Tonight we're going to talk about migration," Simon said in Spanish. "But for us it isn't just something rhetorical, but rather the opposite. Because we have endured, we have suffered, of hunger, thirst, injustice, heat, cold, we have suffered from everything."
Then, under the cover of night, Simon herded them into the woods, toward the fake frontera.
Read on...
Private Prisons Expect To Profit From Immigration Reform
The Senate’s immigration reform bill could provide a boon to private prison companies, the Wall Street Journal reports, increasing the federal prison population “by 14,000 inmates annually” at a cost of $1.6 billion over 10 years.
The legislation invests billions in border security technology, doubles the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents, and authorizes funds “to triple the number of prosecutions of people violating immigration laws along a portion of the U.S. border in Arizona.” “The total additional costs to detain, prosecute, and incarcerate offenders would total $3.1 billion over the 2014–2023 period,” the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Industry officials had been cautious of the legislation’s impacts on the prison business, as reform would decriminalize the estimated 11.1 million undocumented immigrants. But analysts predict that additional spending on border security would almost definitely “boost revenue at privately operated prisons” with private contractors snagging 80 percent of additional inmates.
Read on....
The legislation invests billions in border security technology, doubles the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents, and authorizes funds “to triple the number of prosecutions of people violating immigration laws along a portion of the U.S. border in Arizona.” “The total additional costs to detain, prosecute, and incarcerate offenders would total $3.1 billion over the 2014–2023 period,” the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates.
Industry officials had been cautious of the legislation’s impacts on the prison business, as reform would decriminalize the estimated 11.1 million undocumented immigrants. But analysts predict that additional spending on border security would almost definitely “boost revenue at privately operated prisons” with private contractors snagging 80 percent of additional inmates.
Read on....
Punishment and Profits: Immigration Detention
Fault Lines investigates the business of immigrant detention in the US.
Immigration is a key issue in the US presidential election, with the Republican candidates trying to demonstrate their tough stance on undocumented immigrants.
But under the Obama administration, the detention and deportation of immigrants has reached an all-time high.
Every day, the US government detains more than 33,000 non-citizens at the cost of $5.5mn a day. That is a lot of money for the powerful private prison industry, which spends millions of dollars on lobbying and now operates nearly half of the country's immigration detention centres.
Arrival of the Fittest
Canada’s crime rate is dropping as immigration increases. Is there a connection?
The view from one of Thorncliffe Park’s towersLate last summer, the MV Sun Sea, a small Thai cargo ship, entered Canadian waters off the British Columbia coast, where it was intercepted by the navy and the RCMP. Crowded on board were 492 Tamils, including women and children. The vessel’s arrival was not unexpected; in fact, the government had been monitoring its journey for months and had intelligence that it was smuggling refugees from Sri Lanka. Canada has been a popular destination for people fleeing the ravages of the twenty-six-year civil war and a 2004 tsunami: there are now 20,000 Sri Lankans here, and more coming all the time.
A few days before the Sun Sea reached the coast, public safety minister Vic Toews was in Toronto giving a luncheon speech on national security to the Economic Club of Canada and announced, “I can assure you that we are concerned about who is on that ship and why they might be coming to Canada.” He was referring to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, known as the Tamil Tigers, which has been banned in Canada as a terrorist organization. The previous year, when a rusty ship called the Ocean Lady carrying seventy-six Tamil men arrived off the coast of Vancouver Island, the government arrested the passengers and held them for months, alleging that a third of them were Tamil Tigers sent to infiltrate Canada and set up operations here. (No evidence was ever found to support that claim, and they’ve since been released. All are pursuing refugee claims.)
That the point person was Toews, and not Jason Kenney, the minister of citizenship, immigration, and multiculturalism, was telling. It framed the Sun Sea situation as a potential danger to the public, and prompted a swift response. The passengers were put into detention (nearly sixty of them remain there, and in March two were ordered to be deported because of ties to the Tigers). The government also introduced Bill C-49, which would allow officials to detain smuggled migrants for one year, and bar them from applying for permanent residence and sponsoring family members for five years.
Read on...
This article draws on some work co-authored by Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies prof Ron Levi. Tom
NPR: Private Prisons behind Arizona's Immigration Law
by greendem
Thu Oct 28, 2010 at 07:16:56 AM PDT
Well no wonder the Right wants to shut down NPR.
They keep committing acts of journalism.
Long-term investigation out this morning finds:
Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law
This is one of the most shocking things I have heard on the radio in years. The story begins when a mysterious gentleman shows up in Benson, AZ to pitch a plan to the city manager.
What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.
"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."
But Nichols wasn't buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?
Read on...
Scapegoating Immigrants: Arizona's Real Crisis is Rooted in State Residents' Soaring Drug Abuse
A Public Policy Study from the Centre on Juvenile and Criminal Justice
by Mike Males and Daniel Macallair
From 1990 to 2010, Arizona gained more than 1.3
million new Hispanic residents, approximately 1
million of whom located in the Phoenix metropolitan
area.1 With 2 million legal and an estimated 300,000
undocumented Hispanic residents in the state today,
approximately 31 percent of Arizona’s population and
perhaps as much as 35 percent of the population
within its borders is of Hispanic origin.2
This report examines crime and drug abuse trends in
Arizona over the last two decades of massive legal
and nonlegal Hispanic in-migration. Arizona’s recent
anti-immigrant law3 is based on the theory that crime
rates, especially related to drug distribution, and other
social ills are driven by increases in legal and
nonlegal immigration (see sidebar). Arizona’s
governor even stated that, “the majority of the illegal
trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona
are under the direction and control of organized drug
cartels, and they are bringing drugs in.”4
Read on...
by Mike Males and Daniel Macallair
From 1990 to 2010, Arizona gained more than 1.3
million new Hispanic residents, approximately 1
million of whom located in the Phoenix metropolitan
area.1 With 2 million legal and an estimated 300,000
undocumented Hispanic residents in the state today,
approximately 31 percent of Arizona’s population and
perhaps as much as 35 percent of the population
within its borders is of Hispanic origin.2
This report examines crime and drug abuse trends in
Arizona over the last two decades of massive legal
and nonlegal Hispanic in-migration. Arizona’s recent
anti-immigrant law3 is based on the theory that crime
rates, especially related to drug distribution, and other
social ills are driven by increases in legal and
nonlegal immigration (see sidebar). Arizona’s
governor even stated that, “the majority of the illegal
trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona
are under the direction and control of organized drug
cartels, and they are bringing drugs in.”4
Read on...
An Arizona Congressman's Courageous Dissent
Paul Grijalva
The word "courage" gets thrown around pretty casually in discussions about politics.
But examples of real courage are rare. For the most part, politicians of both parties follow the routes that are safest for them – even when they know they are wrong. Take Arizona Senator John McCain, once an advocate for humane and responsible immigration reform, but now a defender of the crude anti-immigrant crusade implemented by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and her legislative cronies.
McCain knows he is wrong. But he also knows that he faces a tough Republican primary challenge from former Congressman J.D. Hayworth, an immigrant-bashing extremist who has dialed up the crazy by backing demands that President Obama produce a birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States.
Arizona's Vicious New Anti-Immigrant Law Isn't Just Racist; It's Unconstitutional and Counterproductive
According to one study, Arizona would lose $26.4 billion in economic activity and approximately 140,324 jobs if all undocumented people were removed from the state.
A US Border Patrol officers walks beside the border fence that divides the US from Mexico in the town of Nogales, Arizona, on April 22. US President Barack Obama on Friday criticized tough new immigration measures in the southwestern state of Arizona, saying they called into question cherished American notions of fairness.
Photo Credit: AFP/File - Mark Ralston
The conservative "states' rights" mantra sweeping our country has led to one of the most egregious wrongs in recent U.S. history. New legislation in Arizona requires law enforcement officers to stop everyone whom they have "reasonable suspicion" to believe is an undocumented immigrant and arrest them if they fail to produce their papers. What constitutes "reasonable suspicion"? When asked what an undocumented person looks like, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law last week, said, "I don't know what an undocumented person looks like." The bill does not prohibit police from relying on race or ethnicity in deciding who to stop. It is unlikely that officers will detain Irish or German immigrants to check their documents. This law unconstitutionally criminalizes "walking while brown" in Arizona.
Former Arizona attorney general Grant Woods explained to Brewer that SB 1070 would vest too much discretion in the state police and lead to racial profiling and expensive legal fees for the state. But the governor evidently succumbed to racist pressure as she faces a reelection campaign. Woods said, "[Brewer] really felt that the majority of Arizonans fall on the side of, 'Let's solve the problem and not worry about the Constitution.'" The polls Brewer apparently relied on, however, employed questionable methodology and were conducted before heavy media coverage of the controversial legislation. No Democrats and all but one Republican Arizona legislator voted for SB 1070.
Read on...
The conservative "states' rights" mantra sweeping our country has led to one of the most egregious wrongs in recent U.S. history. New legislation in Arizona requires law enforcement officers to stop everyone whom they have "reasonable suspicion" to believe is an undocumented immigrant and arrest them if they fail to produce their papers. What constitutes "reasonable suspicion"? When asked what an undocumented person looks like, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, who signed SB 1070 into law last week, said, "I don't know what an undocumented person looks like." The bill does not prohibit police from relying on race or ethnicity in deciding who to stop. It is unlikely that officers will detain Irish or German immigrants to check their documents. This law unconstitutionally criminalizes "walking while brown" in Arizona.
Former Arizona attorney general Grant Woods explained to Brewer that SB 1070 would vest too much discretion in the state police and lead to racial profiling and expensive legal fees for the state. But the governor evidently succumbed to racist pressure as she faces a reelection campaign. Woods said, "[Brewer] really felt that the majority of Arizonans fall on the side of, 'Let's solve the problem and not worry about the Constitution.'" The polls Brewer apparently relied on, however, employed questionable methodology and were conducted before heavy media coverage of the controversial legislation. No Democrats and all but one Republican Arizona legislator voted for SB 1070.
Read on...
Arizona's Draconian Immigration Law Is Great ... For Our Prison-Industrial Complex
Discussion about "racial profiling" isvmissing the larger point: what about all the business Arizona's sick, racist law will bring to the copper state?
All these liberals whining about “racial profiling” are missing the larger point. We’re in a recession here. Unemployment’s been hovering at ten percent. Perhaps the economy's turned a corner, but the American labor market hasn't.
Yet nobody’s really talking about how Arizona’s new immigration law is going to bring big business to the Copper State.
In 2006, when DHS only had 1.5 million people going through immigration proceedings, the Washington Post reported that ICE held "more detainees a night than Clarion Hotels have guests, operates nearly as many vehicles as Greyhound has buses and flies more people each day than do many small U.S. airlines."
Someone’s got to guard those detainees, clean those buses and fly those planes -- we’re talking about American jobs!
In addition to its own detention facilities -- they're not called "jails" because many of those held are never charged with a crime -- ICE leases thousands of beds in 312 county and city prisons.
Profiting From Immigration Injustice
By Max Blumenthal
| AP / Laura Rauch |
Captured immigrants are herded onto a bus near the Arizona-Mexico border in this file photo. |
When an architect named Norman Pfeiffer designed the Evo DeConcini Federal Courthouse in Tucson, Ariz., he claimed to have been inspired by its natural surroundings. “From afar,” Pfeiffer told Architecture Week, “the desert tells little of what it knows. ... But upon closer scrutiny it reveals its true self.”
The 413,000-square-foot, $67.3 million monolith that Pfeiffer erected blends easily with the pale desert landscape flanking downtown Tucson. The earth-toned structure appears so bland a casual passer-by might not even take a second glance. Only a few observers have ventured inside to witness the spectacle that takes place on the third floor.
The show begins each day at 1 p.m., when about 75 undocumented immigrants just captured along the U.S.-Mexico border are marched into the room in leg irons and manacles and compelled all at once to plead guilty to entering the country illegally. Although the proceeding has the trappings of a trial, the defendants never challenge the charges against them, and are clearly discouraged from doing so. They know their fate is preordained: deportation to a border town, separation from their families and occasionally a few months in a privatized prison.
Detaining children in Britain: No place for the innocent
What kind of country drags vulnerable children from their beds at daybreak, puts them behind bars and fills them with terror? Paul Vallely meets a family who have endured this horror – in Britain. And they're not alone
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Reuters
Corridor of power: Europe's largest detention centre for immigrants, Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre, where the Mansours were takenThe thundering knock came early in the morning. It was 6.30am. Without waiting for an answer the security chain across the door was smashed from its fittings. Feet thundered up the staircase. The five children, all under the age of 10, were alarmed to be woken from their sleep by the dozen burly strangers who burst into their bedrooms, switched on the lights and shouted at them to get up.
This is not a police state. It is Manchester in supposedly civilised Britain in the 21st century. There is a clue to what this is about in the names of the children: Nardin, who is 10; Karin who is seven; the three-year-old twins Bishoy and Anastasia, and their one-year-old baby sister Angela.
Their parents, Hany and Samah Mansour, are Coptic Christians who fled to the UK after a campaign of persecution by a group of Islamic fundamentalists in Egypt whose friends in the secret police tortured Hany. But even though six Coptic Christians were shot dead by Muslim extremists only last week in a town not far from their home, the British Government has decided that it does not believe them. And so Britain's deportation police have launched another of their terrifying dawn raids on sleeping children.
25 Days In Federal Prison For Littering? Border Patrol Cracking Down on Human Rights Activists
By Jessica Weisberg, AlterNet. Posted December 14, 2009.
Walt Staton was dropping off water jugs for people who attempt the often deadly trek into Arizona from Mexico when the Feds ticketed him for "knowingly littering."
On Friday December 4th, an Arizona District Court judge told Walt Staton, a 28 year-old seminary student, that he might be facing 25 days in a federal prison. His crime was "knowingly littering" along the U.S.-Mexico border.
One day last December, Staton and a friend named Victor Ceballos, loaded 70 plastic water jugs into the back of a truck and drove from Tucson to outer stretches of Sonora desert. Temperatures in the desert are extreme, reaching 120 degrees during summer months and dropping below 30 degrees in the winter. Many people who attempt the four-day trek between the Mexico border and Phoenix do not survive; this year, a human rights group found the remains of 206 people. The main causes of death, the group believes, are heat overexposure or hypothermia, but corpses decompose so quickly in the desert that it is often impossible to tell.
Read on...
Walt Staton was dropping off water jugs for people who attempt the often deadly trek into Arizona from Mexico when the Feds ticketed him for "knowingly littering."
On Friday December 4th, an Arizona District Court judge told Walt Staton, a 28 year-old seminary student, that he might be facing 25 days in a federal prison. His crime was "knowingly littering" along the U.S.-Mexico border.
One day last December, Staton and a friend named Victor Ceballos, loaded 70 plastic water jugs into the back of a truck and drove from Tucson to outer stretches of Sonora desert. Temperatures in the desert are extreme, reaching 120 degrees during summer months and dropping below 30 degrees in the winter. Many people who attempt the four-day trek between the Mexico border and Phoenix do not survive; this year, a human rights group found the remains of 206 people. The main causes of death, the group believes, are heat overexposure or hypothermia, but corpses decompose so quickly in the desert that it is often impossible to tell.
Read on...
Immigration: No More Secret Prisons
By Julie Greene, Huffington Post. Posted February 24, 2009.
Across the United States, tens of thousands of immigrants are being held in detention facilities that violate basic standards of humanity.
On January 22, 2009, President Obama ordered the closing of Guantanamo within one year, an overhaul of detention policies, and an end to torture and secret prisons around the world. He also called for the creation of a task force to study United States detention policy overseas. In particular, he declared that the "apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition" of individuals must not violate either the interests of national security or the interests of justice. And he ordered that our policies must comply with the Geneva Conventions, including Article 3 which stipulates that detainees be treated humanely and prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity." Human rights advocates around the world applauded the President's executive orders.
Read on...
Across the United States, tens of thousands of immigrants are being held in detention facilities that violate basic standards of humanity.
On January 22, 2009, President Obama ordered the closing of Guantanamo within one year, an overhaul of detention policies, and an end to torture and secret prisons around the world. He also called for the creation of a task force to study United States detention policy overseas. In particular, he declared that the "apprehension, detention, trial, transfer, release, or other disposition" of individuals must not violate either the interests of national security or the interests of justice. And he ordered that our policies must comply with the Geneva Conventions, including Article 3 which stipulates that detainees be treated humanely and prohibits "outrages upon personal dignity." Human rights advocates around the world applauded the President's executive orders.
Read on...
9,000 'ordinary people' flee Mexican drug war
MARINA JIMÉNEZ
IMMIGRATION REPORTER
October 20, 2008 at 8:07 AM EDT
A record number of Mexicans are fleeing to Canada, claiming their own country cannot keep them safe as it struggles to contain a grisly narcotics war that is spilling into nightclubs and restaurants.
There are currently 9,070 Mexican refugee claimants waiting to have their cases heard, the largest number yet from one country since the Immigration and Refugee Board was established in 1989.
"We all know and love Mexico and Mexican beaches, but that is not the real Mexico," said Doug Lehrer, a Toronto lawyer. "Mexican authorities are completely overwhelmed and can't offer ordinary people a reasonable level of protection."
Read on...
More collateral damage from the extended war on drugs. Tom
IMMIGRATION REPORTER
October 20, 2008 at 8:07 AM EDT
A record number of Mexicans are fleeing to Canada, claiming their own country cannot keep them safe as it struggles to contain a grisly narcotics war that is spilling into nightclubs and restaurants.
There are currently 9,070 Mexican refugee claimants waiting to have their cases heard, the largest number yet from one country since the Immigration and Refugee Board was established in 1989.
"We all know and love Mexico and Mexican beaches, but that is not the real Mexico," said Doug Lehrer, a Toronto lawyer. "Mexican authorities are completely overwhelmed and can't offer ordinary people a reasonable level of protection."
Read on...
More collateral damage from the extended war on drugs. Tom
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)