Illegal Aliens and crime

Illegal aliens in this context are used to refer to immigrants who sneak into the United States without getting proper documentation. Immigrants are people who move out of their country and goes to another country to set up a permanent residence. Crime refers to an unlawful act punishable by a state or other authority. The thesis or objective of this research is to identify the relationship between illegal aliens (immigrants) and the number of crimes happening in the United States. It is set to explain whether immigrants have a direct relation to the number of crimes that occur in the United States neighborhood.

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According to recent research held by Pew Research Center statistics (2018) show that about 10.7 million people in the U.s are illegal immigrants. Out of these only 105,140 were convicted of a crime in the fiscal year 2018 which represented a tiny percentage. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (2018) the number of inmates who are not united citizens is 83,573 which include less than 6% to the total prison population. Despite these statistics, the authorities argue that one in every five prisoners is an illegal immigrant thus constituting 21% of the prisoners. The US attorney general claimed that the crime rate of illegal immigrants should have been zero or the crime committed should have been prevented (Jeff 2017).

According to UCR data 2016, 746 native-born Texans, 32 illegal immigrants, and 28 legal immigrants were convicted of homicide. The conviction rate for native-born Americans in Texas was 3.2 per 100,000 natives while it was 1.8 per 100,000 illegal immigrants and 0.9 per 100,000 legal immigrants. The illegal immigrant conviction rate for homicide was 44 percent below that of native-born Americans in 2016 in Texas. Up to the year 2016 the US saw a 118% increase in its immigrant population as published in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice showed in December 2016. The rate of violent crime however, fell by 36% to about 386 incidents per 100,000 residents.

Conclusion

Therefore, the above study shows that illegal aliens are negatively associated with crime. People tend to be too judgmental and associate immigrants to crimes and unrests and most often term them as a threat to their safety. Immigrants do not like to associate themselves with crime as they do not like drawing attention but rather engage in their businesses.

Work cited

Malone, Clare. "The First FBI Crime Report Issued Under Trump Is Missing A Ton Of Info." FiveThirtyEight, 27 Oct. 2017, fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-first-fbi-crime-report-issued-under-trump-is-missing-a-ton-of-info/.UCR. "Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data: National Incident-Based Reporting System, [United States], 2016." ICPSR, 2016, www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/studies/37065.Flagg, Anna. "The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant." Breaking News, World News & Multimedia - The New York Times, 28 Mar. 2018, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-immigration-myth.html.Light, M. T., and T. Y. Miller. "DOES UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRATION INCREASE VIOLENT CRIME?" PubMed Central (PMC), 2017, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6241529/.