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Illegal Immigrant Incarceration Rates, 2010–2018: Demographics and Policy I
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Author: TheCrow Date:
1/10/2022 11:43:17 AM +0/-0
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About 88.1 percent of all prisoners are men, whereas only 11.9 percent are women (Table 5). Legal and illegal immigrant women make up a smaller proportion of their respective prisoner populations than native‐born women, while men make up a higher proportion. The sex distribution of legal immigrant prisoners is far closer to that of native‐born Americans than to that of illegal immigrants.
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Prisoners in every subpopulation are less educated than their total subpopulation (Table 6). About 63.7 percent of all native‐born adults, including those not incarcerated, have some college education or above, whereas 18.6 percent of native‐born prisoners have the same level of education. A total of 23.6 percent of legal immigrant prisoners and 14.4 percent of illegal immigrant prisoners have some college education or above, percentages that are lower than the percentages of their subpopulations with the same level of education (53.9 percent and 42.8 percent, respectively).27 Those in every immigration category who are highly educated tend to avoid incarceration.
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Native‐born Americans and illegal immigrants have higher incarceration rates when they are young (Table 7). The peak incarceration rate for native‐born Americans and illegal immigrants is between ages 30 and 34. The legal immigrant incarceration rate peaks between ages 25 and 29.
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The incarceration rates for legal and illegal immigrants generally increase with the amount of time they have spent in the United States, the major exception being the higher legal immigrant incarceration rate in the 0–4 years category that then falls once legal immigrants have been here for 5–9 years (Table 8). A possible reason for this phenomenon is that legal immigrants who are criminally inclined rapidly run afoul of the law, serve short prison sentences, and are removed from the United States quickly enough that the incarceration rate for the 5–9 years of residency category declines greatly.
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Related to the amount of time immigrants have spent in the United States, illegal and legal immigrants who immigrate at a younger age are more likely to be incarcerated (Table 9). Illegal immigrants who arrive between ages 0 and 17 are about twice as likely to be incarcerated than those who arrive after age 17, suggesting that illegal immigrants who were old enough to choose to come here illegally are more law‐abiding than those who were brought here as minors.
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The pattern is even more pronounced for legal immigrants. Those who immigrated between the ages of 0 and 17 were more than twice as likely to be incarcerated than legal immigrants who came at later ages. This again suggests that those old enough to choose to come to the United States legally are more law‐abiding. At least two nonmutually exclusive theories can explain why those who entered in their youth have higher incarceration rates. First, spending part of one’s childhood in the United States assimilates many immigrants to our high‐crime culture. A second theory is that those who decide to come here have some systematically different characteristics that make them less likely to commit crimes, whereas those who are too young to make the decision to immigrate do not.
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Visa overstays far outnumber illegal border crossing
+0/-0 TheCrow 1/10/2022 11:26:40 AM
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