By Eric Herman
The Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — Some say undocumented immigrants — illegal aliens, as they’re often called — spread crime when they come to the U.S. Others say that is a myth.
Reliable statistics on crime by undocumented immigrants are hard to come by. But the Chicago Sun-Times has learned that less than 4 percent of the adults in Illinois prisons have been identified as illegal immigrants. And as of mid-July, less than 3 percent of the inmates in Cook County Jail were illegals.
Those incarceration figures nearly mirror the undocumented immigrant population.
The U.S. has 11.5 million illegal immigrants, about 4 percent of the total U.S. population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Illinois has an illegal immigrant population of about 432,000 — just over 3 percent of the state’s population, according to a University of Illinois at Chicago study.
The figures show illegal aliens “are not over-represented [in jails], despite the conventional wisdom that they are much more involved in criminal activity,” said Ronald Weitzer, a criminologist at George Washington University.
“Criminologists see it as something of a myth that immigrants are involved in more crime,” Weitzer said. “The public thinks that with higher immigration comes higher crime, but that just isn’t borne out by the data.”
However, statistics do little to calm passions roiled whenever an illegal immigrant commits a high-profile crime.
In August, Jose Carranza, an illegal immigrant from Peru, was charged with the execution-style killings of three students in New Jersey. And illegals have been accused or convicted of numerous well- and lesser-known crimes in the Chicago area, including the case of a Kenyan man charged with murdering a 13-year-old girl in June.
According to the Illinois Department of Corrections, about 1,700 of the approximately 45,000 adults now in Illinois prisons are illegal aliens. As of mid-July, the Cook County Jail had 255 illegals out of a jail population of 9,500, according to Sheriff Tom Dart’s office.
Those numbers are, as of now, the best snapshot available.
But they could be incomplete.
That’s because the figures are based on “detainer warrants” — and not every illegal immigrant in jail or prison has one. What’s more, immigrants tend to under-report crime in their communities out of fear of the police, Weitzer said.
The Cook County Jail figures also could be misleading, since not everyone in custody can be considered a criminal — some have been charged with crimes but not convicted.
In any event, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — known as ICE — can deport someone here illegally whether they’ve committed a crime or not.
Homeland Security estimated 302,500 criminal illegal aliens would be locked up in state and local jails throughout the U.S. in fiscal year 2007. But the lack of hard data leaves both sides of the debate free to make assertions.
“There’ve been over 64,000 citizens that have been killed by illegal aliens” since 9/11, claimed Tim Bueler, media adviser to the Minuteman Project, an anti-immigration group. Moreover, he said, “as soon as they set foot in our country undocumented, they have broken the law.”
But Sioban Albiol, who teaches immigration law at DePaul University, said, “the statistics and the facts don’t support” the claim that illegals commit a disproportionate amount of crime.
Ruben Rumbaut, a sociology professor at the University of California at Irvine, wrote in a recent study that “immigrants have the lowest rates of imprisonment for criminal convictions in American society.”
But arrests and incarceration increase when it comes to immigrants’ American-born children, Rumbaut noted.
Immigrants, Rumbaut told the Sun-Times, “don’t have time to mess around. But their U.S.-born children have time to pick up a lot of bad habits of American society.”
FEWER DEPORTEES HAVE BROKEN LAW
The percentage of deportees who have committed crimes is shrinking in the region that includes Illinois — although the overall numbers are inching up.
In fiscal year 2003, the feds deported 4,897 aliens from the six-state region encompassing Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Kansas and Missouri. Of those, 2,389, or 49 percent, had committed crimes.
In 2004, 46 percent of those deported had committed crimes. In 2005, 41 percent had committed crimes.
In the last fiscal year — October 2005 through September 2006 — ICE deported 7,137 people from the six-state region. Of those, 2,659, or 37 percent, had committed crimes, ICE records show.
WARRANTS MAY NOT TELL WHOLE STORY
The Cook County sheriff and Illinois Department of Corrections base their illegal alien counts on “detainer warrants” lodged by ICE.
ICE lodges a detainer when officials determine an inmate is in the U.S. illegally. The detainer means immigration authorities will take custody of a person when he or she released from prison.
But ICE doesn’t lodge a detainer against every undocumented immigrant. Every day at Cook County Criminal Court, ICE agents evaluate the people in custody who are about to go through bond court. But the agents usually lodge detainers only against people with previous criminal records.
“Odds are there are a lot more illegal aliens in the [Cook County] Jail than there are immigration holds on,” said a law enforcement source.
ALLEGED CRIMES BY LOCAL ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS
— Carlos Martinez, 33, from Honduras, is charged with raping, beating and stabbing a woman near 21st Place and Ashland Avenue on Sept. 24, 2007.
— Martin Correa, 21, from Mexico, repeatedly snuck into the bedroom of a 12-year-old South Side girl in 2007 and had sex with her, prosecutors said.
— Mwenda Murithi, 26, from Kenya, allegedly ordered a fellow gang member to shoot at a rival gang in Logan Square in June. A shot instead killed 13-year-old Schanna Gayden.
— Jose Verra, 23, from Mexico, was arrested in July for allegedly growing up to 30,000 marijuana plants worth $5 million in a Cook County forest preserve near Barrington.
— Eulalio Haro, from Mexico, had already been deported three times when he allegedly hit and killed a motorcyclist in McHenry County in 2006. Haro had a blood-alcohol content more than three times the legal limit, authorities said. He already had a reckless homicide conviction for a drunken-driving accident that killed his brother.
Copyright 2007 Chicago Sun-Times