‘HALF TRUE’ // MAYOR JAVIER GONZALES RATED BY POLITIFACT ON SANCTUARY CITY COMMENTS
immigrant communities, and scholars’ findings that immigrants, including those in the country illegally, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born residents. But not enough of the research focused specifically on sanctuary cities to totally satisfy Politifact.
“Gonzales’s statement overstates the breadth of research on this topic, but is on the right track,” said Politifact. “We rate the claim Half True.”
In Santa Fe and other sanctuary cities, local law enforcement officers are directed against asking those they arrest or otherwise encounter about their immigration status, and they’re not supposed to help enforce federal immigration law.
Most of the research that City Hall provided to back up Gonzales’ “study after study” statement is about whether crime is higher among immigrants generally, not in sanctuary cities. This distinction among the various research papers is why the mayor earned only the “Half True” rating by Politifact, which also conducted its own fresh interviews on the topic.
City Hall gave me links to:
■ An article published in the Wall Street Journal from last year headlined “The Mythical Connection Between Immigrants and Crime.”
While the mayor’s staff described the article as written by the WSJ, it was actually an “op-ed” opinion piece by a California labor and immigration law attorney. Still, it contains useful information. Attorney Eli Kantor cited a study by the Immigration Policy Center that found that, while the immigrant population tripled between 1990 and 2013 to more than 11.2 million, the FBI found that the violent crime rate declined by almost half over the same period and property crimes also went down significantly. Kantor mentioned another report from the same organization that found immigrants across the board have lower incarceration rates for young men than the rest of the population. (Politifact noted the Immigration Policy Center’s work, but also pointed out that the organization has a proimmigrant bias.) Kantor also referred to a 2008 report by the Public Policy Institute of California that said immigrants are underrepresented in that state’s prison system, with foreign-born people making up 35 percent of California’s population, but only 17 percent of prisoners. City Hall provided a separate link to this study.
A report from the Kellogg
■ School of Management at Northwestern University. The study reviewed nationwide crime statistics from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program and local records from every county in the continental U.S. giving the percentage of local residents who were immigrants, covering the years 1980 to 2000.
The study found no correlation between immigrants and violent crime. There was a “modest” correlation between immigration and property crime, present only with regard to “immigrants with the poorest labor market outcome.”
■ A 2014 report by an Arizona State University researcher on “the minority threat perspective” cites several prior studies that found “that immigration in fact may contribute to lower, not to higher, crime rates, and that, at the individual level, being an immigrant, especially a first-generation one, is not associated with greater criminality and, indeed, may be associated with a smaller likelihood of offending.”
■ A 2009 study by a University of California researcher published in the California law review does address sanctuary city policies, although without a hard focus on crime rates. Among its finding are that, in Austin, a public outreach campaign was used to increase understanding among immigrants of the city’s sanctuary policy. “Victim and witness reporting increased” and crime levels in Austin fell, says the study. It also says that members of Los Angeles’ police force, in an internal report, believed sanctuary policies created “a marked difference in the attitude of the immigrant community.”
“Of the many motivations for sanctuary policies, the goal of encouraging community cooperation enjoys the strongest empirical evidence and anecdotal support,” says this report. Advocates like Gonzales have long maintained that having police not ask about immigration status encourages immigrants to report crime and trust police instead of being afraid to engage with law enforcement.
■ Most on point is a study by researchers at the University of California at Riverside and Highline College in Iowa called “The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration” published just in October. Noted in Politifact’s report, it compared sanctuary cities with “similar cities where key variables are the same.” So this research appears to address the question — which was directed at Gonzales during his recent interviews with national media — of whether sanctuary cities, by advertising their stance against helping the feds enforce immigration law, serve as “magnets” for undocumented criminals. “We find no statistically discernible difference in violent crime rate, rape, or property crime across the cities,” the new study’s summary says. “Our findings provide evidence that sanctuary policies have no effect on crime rates, despite narratives to the contrary. The potential benefits of sanctuary cities, such as better incorporation of the undocumented community and cooperation with the police, thus have little cost for the cities in question in terms of crime.” The study itself notes that “there has been little academic inquiry into the phenomena of sanctuary cities” previously. One thing this episode shows is that Politifact’s standards are pretty tough — I may have given Gonzales a “mostly true” rating on the Truth-O-Meter, although Politifact is right that studies specifically addressing sanctuary cities and crime appear to be a new field. It also serves notice to the Santa Fe mayor as he stakes out something of a national profile by talking about this issue and others. He better be careful — the Truth-O-Meter awaits.