By Alex Nowrasteh

Crime committed by illegal immigrants is an important public policy issue that should affect the allocation of federal immigration enforcement resources, state and local law enforcement resources, and policies toward arresting, detaining, and removing illegal immigrants.1 This brief uses Texas Department of Public Safety data to measure the rate at which individuals were convicted and arrested by crime and immigration status in Texas in 2019. This brief is an update, expansion, and improvement of earlier publications that measured criminal conviction and arrest rates by immigration status in Texas in 2015, 2017, and 2018 using the same data source. The results in this updated brief show that in Texas in 2019, illegal immigrants were 37.1 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans and legal immigrants were about 57.2 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans. The conviction and arrest rates for illegal immigrants were lower than those for native-born Americans but higher than those for legal immigrants. This result holds for just about every type of crime, including homicide, sex crimes, larceny, and most other crimes.

Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2021. 7p.

By Sean Kennedy, Jason Richwine, and Steven A. Camarota

Activists and academics have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) in studies claiming that illegal immigrants have relatively low crime rates. These studies do not appreciate that it can take years for Texas to identify convicts as illegal immigrants while they are in custody. As a result, the studies misclassify as native-born a significant number of offenders who are later identified as illegal immigrants.

New York: Center for immigration Studies, 2022. 5p.

By Transnational Records Access Clearinghouse

In this report, TRAC examines the growth of ATD during the first year of the Biden administration using detailed data obtained from ICE through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These data on ICE’s ATD program are not the most current. As TRAC recently announced, by the end of September 2022 the number of people in ATD exceeded 300,000 for the first time. Nonetheless, the data in this report provide a far more detailed picture than ICE’s regular ATD releases.

Syracuse, NY: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, 2022.

By Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, Office of the Special Representative and Co-ordinator for Combating Trafficking in Human Beings

The publication takes stock of technology tools and initiatives developed to combat trafficking in human beings in its different forms in the OSCE area and beyond. It also examines the ways technology can be misused to facilitate trafficking in human beings. It is the first known publication to conduct a global analysis of how different stakeholders, including law enforcement, civil society, businesses and academia can take advantage of technology to advance the fight against the human trafficking crime. The publication also provides recommendations to governments and organizations funding technology projects on how to maximize the value of technology-based solutions.

Vienna: Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, 2020. 78p.

By Santadarshan Sadhu, Kareem Kysia, Letitia Onyango, Clifford Zinnes, Sarah Lord, Alexandre Monnard, and Ingrid Rojas Arellano

In 2010, in response to evidence of children working under hazardous conditions in the West African cocoa sector, the Governments of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, representatives from the International Chocolate and Cocoa Industry (Industry), and the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) signed a Declaration and Framework tied to the Harkin-Engel Protocol, under which Industry publicly acknowledged child labor in the cocoa sector and committed to take steps to address it. In the signing of the Declaration and Framework, these partners committed to take action to reduce child labor and the worst forms of child labor (WFCL) in cocoa production towards the goal of achieving a 70 percent reduction in the WFCL in the cocoa sectors of the two countries in the aggregate by 2020. The Child Labor Cocoa Coordinating Group (CLCCG) was established to coordinate efforts among the partners working under the Declaration and Framework. The Framework lays out multiple goals to support implementation of the Declaration and further the aims of the original Protocol. Among those goals was the continuation of nationally representative child labor surveys, recurring at least every 5 years. The aim of the surveys was to provide comparable data for ongoing assessments of child labor prevalence in cocoa growing areas of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana and included a commitment to make publicly available the related survey methodologies, data, and reports based on the findings of these surveys. Under this goal, surveys were carried out by Tulane University during the 2008/09 and 2013/14 cocoa harvest seasons in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. In 2016, NORC at the University of Chicago (NORC) was awarded a four-year cooperative agreement by the USDOL Bureau of International Labor Affairs 1 (ILAB) to implement the 2018/2019 Assessing Progress in Reducing Child Labor in Cocoa Production in Cocoa Growing Areas of Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana project.

Chicago: NORC at the University of Chicago. 2020. 301p.

By Allan Ngari and Duncan E Omondi Gumba

Child labour is a serious problem in the cocoa industry in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, with children often trafficked from neighbouring countries to work in the cocoa fields. This paper delves into the cocoa industry in the two countries and its challenges. It argues that multinational corporations operating in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana should be held criminally responsible for their role in cocoa production when it involves illicit activities and explores how national and regional laws can be used as a tool to do so.

ENACT (Africa), 2022. 24p.

By Every Child Protected Against Trafficking (ECPAT UK), Anti-Slavery International (Anti-Slavery) and Pacific Links Foundation (Pacific Links)

Over one and a half years the research investigated the issue of human trafficking from Vietnam to the UK, and through Europe; specifically Poland, the Czech Republic, France and the Netherlands to the UK. This report summarises the main findings of the research. It highlights that whilst there are many vulnerabilities which result in a person leaving Vietnam, vulnerabilities are not inherent in all Vietnamese migrants. Situational and contextual factors can increase vulnerability and risk of trafficking across all aspects of a migrant’s journey from Vietnam to Europe. In recent years, human trafficking from Vietnam across Europe to the UK has gained considerable attention from the UK public, the UK Government and NGOs working to protect the rights of vulnerable victims of trafficking. Motivated by previous reports highlighting an increase of Vietnamese children and adults forced to grow cannabis in the UK or exploited in nail bars, 1 combating human trafficking (or modern slavery) of Vietnamese people has officially been prioritised by the UK Government. This is in part due to the consistently high number of Vietnamese nationals reported as potential victims of human trafficking via the National Referral Mechanism (NRM), the UK’s system for identification and protection of victims. The figures from 2009-2018 show that 3,187 Vietnamese adults and children have been identified as potential victims of trafficking. 2 For the past few years, both Vietnamese adults and children have appeared within the top three nationalities of those identified as potential victims of trafficking in the UK.

Despite the growing body of research on human trafficking from Vietnam and the UK Government’s renewed commitment to combating modern slavery, vulnerable Vietnamese adults and children continue to suffer exploitation at the hands of traffickers throughout Europe, including in the UK. Identification, protection measures and support for victims are often inadequate, increasing the vulnerability of migrants. Many Vietnamese victims of trafficking transiting through European countries experience long and arduous journeys. They are abused and exploited through forced labour or sexual exploitation, often at the hands of European gangs and traffickers. In many cases, victims are coming to the attention of authorities in European countries, but authorities fail to identify them as victims of trafficking; seeing them as irregular migrants or criminals. Significant numbers of Vietnamese children who come to the attention of authorities in Europe and the UK are going missing from care, never to return. While it is important to recognise the root causes or ‘push’ factors in Vietnam that influence, or even force, people to emigrate (putting them at risk of trafficking), it is equally important to understand shifting elements of vulnerability in the wider context of transit countries. It is also crucial for European governments, including the UK Government, to take action and implement victim-centred approaches to safe migration and the protection of victims and potential victims of trafficking.

London: ECPAT UK, 2019. 136p.

By Mary Bosworth

On any given day nearly 3000 foreign national citizens are detained under immigration powers in UK detention centers alone. Around the world immigrants are routinely detained in similar conditions. The institutions charged with immigrant detention are volatile and contested sites. They are also places about which we know very little. What is their goal? How do they operate? How are they justified

Inside Immigration Detention lifts the lid on the hidden world of migrant detention, presenting the first national study of life in British immigration removal centers. Offering more than just a description of life behind bars of those men and women awaiting deportation, it uses staff and detainee testimonies to revisit key assumptions about state power and the legacies of colonialism under conditions of globalization.

Based on fieldwork conducted in six immigration removal centers (IRCs) between 2009 and 2012, it draws together a large amount of empirical data including: detainee surveys and interviews, staff interviews, observation, and detailed field notes. From this, the book explores how immigration removal centers identify their inhabitants as strangers, constructing them as unfamiliar, ambiguous and uncertain. In this endeavor, the establishments are greatly assisted by their resemblance to prisons and by familiar racialized narratives about foreigners and nationality.

However, as staff and detainee testimonies reveal, in their interactions and day-to-day life women and men find many points of commonality. Such recognition of one another reveals the goal and effect of detention to be incomplete. Denial requires effort. In order to minimize the effort it must expend, the state 'governs at distance', via the contract. It also splits itself in two, deploying some immigration staff onsite, while keeping the actual decision-makers (the caseworkers) elsewhere, sequestered from the potentially destabilizing effects of facing up to those whom they wish to remove. Such distancing, while bureaucratically effective, contributes to the uncertainty of daily life in detention, and is often the source of considerable criticism and unease. Denial and familiarity are embodied and localized activities, whose pains and contradictions are inherent in concrete relationships.

Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2014. 283p.

By Galina Cornelisse

Practices of immigration detention in Europe are largely resistant to conventional forms of legal correction. By rethinking the notion of territorial sovereignty in modern constitutionalism, this book puts forward a solution to the problem of legally permissive immigration detention.

Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2010. 403p.

Edited by Maria João Guia, Robert Koulish, Valsamis Mitsilegas

This book offers a brand new point of view on immigration detention, pursuing a multidisciplinary approach and presenting new reflections by internationally respected experts from academic and institutional backgrounds. It offers an in-depth perspective on the immigration framework, together with the evolution of European and international political decisions on the management of immigration. Readers will be introduced to new international decisions on the protection of human rights, together with international measures concerning the detention of immigrants.

In recent years, International Law and European Law have converged to develop measures for combatting irregular immigration. Some of them include the criminalization of illegally entering a member state or illegally remaining there after legally entering. Though migration has become a great challenge for policymakers, legislators and society as a whole, we must never forget that migrants should enjoy the same human rights and legal protection as everyone else.

Cham: Springer, 2016. 293p.

By Brynn O'Brien

Australia sends asylum seekers to offshore camps where they are detained indefinitely and subjected to well documented abuses, in violation of their human rights.

The Australian Government outsources the operations at the camps, and Spanish company Ferrovial has responsibility for the system’s largest operational contracts, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Broadspectrum. Investors in Ferrovial, including the Norwegian Pension Fund, are exposed to the significant risks of association with human rights abuse.

Canberra: Australia Institute, 2016. 29p.

By Alex Nowrasteh, Andrew C. Forrester and Michelangelo Landgrave

Donald J. Trump launched his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in June 2015 by comments on illegal immigrants and the crime they commit in the United States. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people.”1 A few weeks after Trump’s announcement, 32- year-old Kate Steinle was shot and killed by an illegal immigrant Jos´e Inez Garc´ıa Z´arate in San Francisco, California. Although Z´arate was later acquitted of all murder and manslaughter charges due to mistakes made by the prosecutor, his shooting of Steinle seemed to support Trump’s worry about illegal immigrants causing a crime spree and helped win him the election in 2016. As tragic as the shooting and death of Kate Steinle was, it was one of the 13,455 murders that year in the United States and it does not tell us how many of those victims were murdered by illegal immigrants.2 The most important measure that matters when judging the crime rates of illegal immigrants is how likely they are to be criminals compared to other sub-populations. If illegal immigrants are more likely to be criminals then their presence in the United States would raise crime rates, supporting Trump’s assertions. But if illegal immigrants are less likely to commit crime then they would lower the nationwide crime rate. Politically, this debate spills over to evaluating whether domestic immigration enforcement policies reduce crime. Illegal immigrant crime is also central to the debate over sanctuary jurisdictions that refuse to turn over many illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the effects of a border wall, and whether Border Patrol requires more resources to counter crime along the border. Answering whether illegal immigrants are particularly crime prone is essential to addressing these concerns and setting efficient anti-crime policies.

Washington, DC: Cato Institute, 2020. 30p.

By Walter A. Ewing, Daniel E. Martinez and Rubén G. Rumbaut

For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime. This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education. In other words, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are not “criminals” by any commonly accepted definition of the term. For this reason, harsh immigration policies are not effective in fighting crime. Unfortunately, immigration policy is frequently shaped more by fear and stereotype than by empirical evidence. As a result, immigrants have the stigma of “criminality” ascribed to them by an ever-evolving assortment of laws and immigration-enforcement mechanisms. Put differently, immigrants are being defined more and more as threats. Whole new classes of “felonies” have been created which apply only to immigrants, deportation has become a punishment for even minor offenses, and policies aimed at trying to end unauthorized immigration have been made more punitive rather than more rational and practical. In short, immigrants themselves are being criminalized.

Washington, DC: American Immigration Council, 2015. 28p.

By Pia Orrenius and Madeline Zavodny

Opponents of immigration often claim that immigrants, particularly those who are unauthorized, are more likely than U.S. natives to commit crimes and that they pose a threat to public safety. There is little evidence to support these claims. In fact, research overwhelmingly indicates that immigrants are less likely than similar U.S. natives to commit violent and property crimes, and that areas with more immigrants have similar or lower rates of violent and property crimes than areas with fewer immigrants. There are relatively few studies specifically of criminal behavior among unauthorized immigrants, but the limited research suggests that these immigrants also have a lower propensity to commit crime than their native-born peers, although possibly a higher propensity than legal immigrants. Evidence about legalization programs is consistent with these findings, indicating that a legalization program reduces crime rates. Meanwhile, increased border enforcement, which reduces unauthorized immigrant inflows, has mixed effects on crime rates. A large-scale legalization program, which is not currently under serious consideration, has more potential to improve public safety and security than several other policies that have recently been proposed or implemented.

Dallas: Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, 2019. 19p.

By Guillermo Vázquez del Mercado, Luis Félix, and Gerardo Carballo

Gangs and criminal organizations in Central America continue to seek means of adapting to COVID-19 while communities look to build resilience to its effects. The aim of this report is to contribute to the understanding of extortion in an evolving context as pandemic-related mobility restrictions are enforced and lifted in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica and Panama.

The report identifies the evolving role of women in gang schemes and dynamics; explores criminal structures in Panama and their relationship with extortion; and highlights trends among extortion practices as they shift to other criminal activities such as large-scale and local trafficking of cannabis and cocaine.

Geneva: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, 2021. 19p.

By Eunice Hyunhye Cho, Tara Tidwell Cullen and Clara Long

Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration, a research report from the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights Watch, and the National Immigrant Justice Center, provides an in-depth examination of the state of immigrant detention. Through visits to five detention facilities, interviews with 150 detained people, and analysis of government data, this report shines a light onto our nation’s treatment of immigrants. Specifically, the findings illustrate how the immigrant detention system has grown since 2017, the poor conditions and inadequate medical care — even before the COVID-19 outbreak, and the due process hurdles faced by immigrants held in remote locations.

New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 2020. 82p.

By The Southern Poverty Law Center

This report features stories from women swept up in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that began on Jan. 2, 2016. The report by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights found that the federal government has engaged in a needlessly aggressive – and potentially unconstitutional – act against immigrants with these home raids that targeted women and children from Central America.

Montgomery, AL: SPLC, 2016. 28p.

By The United States Commission on Civil Rights

This Statutory Enforcement Report examines the civil rights and constitutional concerns that the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Commission) “raised with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its component [agencies] over the treatment of adult and minor [immigrant] detainees [who are being] held under federal law in detention centers across the country.” Specifically, this report analyzes the constitutional issues surrounding DHS’s treatment of detained immigrants as well as other selected federal agencies’ efforts to comply with established Performance Based National Detention Standards (PBNDS), the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA), and the federal standards for detaining unaccompanied minor children.

It is within the Commission’s mandate to examine, study, and report upon civil rights violations inconsistent with the federal civil rights laws, the United States Constitution and the federal standards applicable to all persons within the United States and its territories. By statute, the Commission is authorized to examine federal policies and procedures that have a detrimental effect on the equal protection of law guaranteed to all persons under the Constitution. With regard to immigration, in 1980, the Commission released a report entitled The Tarnished Golden Door: Civil Rights Issues in Immigration that examined the civil rights issues surrounding the enforcement of the immigration laws of the United States. That report identified numerous issues surrounding the former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) administration and enforcement of U.S. immigration laws. Since the Commission published that 1980 report, however, federal immigration laws and their enforcement practices have undergone numerous, sweeping changes.

Washington, DC: The Commission, 2015. 276p.

By Nina Rabin

Young people in immigrant families are often characterized as a separate population in debates over immigration reform, with distinctive claims and interests as compared to their parents. Bifurcating the undocumented population between children and parents over-simplifies how immigration enforcement impacts families. This article challenges the dichotomy between children and parents by studying how young people who are not direct enforcement targets are nevertheless impacted by immigration enforcement policies, regardless of their own immigration status. These impacts, which I call “secondary immigration enforcement,” often manifest as family separations. To render secondary immigration enforcement visible, I studied 38 young people in Arizona who are living on their own – without either biological parent – at least in part because of immigration enforcement policies. Drawing on in-depth interviews and self-assessments of psycho-social functioning, I describe what secondary immigration enforcement looks like and how it operates. I illustrate that deportation statistics alone fail to capture the extent of immigration enforcement because they do not encompass the complex impacts of secondary enforcement. In addition to the acute disruptions caused by deportations of family members, the young people in the study also experienced family separation as a result of immigration enforcement’s interaction with three other key factors: family dysfunction, extreme poverty, and educational aspirations.

Tucson: The University of Arizona, James E. Rogers College of Law, 2017. 37p.

By Izabella Majcher and Michael Flynn

This Global Detention Project Special Report, commissioned by the Norwegian Red Cross, systematically compares conditions and operations at detention centres in five European countries to identify practices that may be used to develop “harm reducing” strategies in detention. The report, which the Norwegian Red Cross commissioned in an effort to identify possible reforms in Norway’s detention practices, addresses several key questions:

In Norway’s Trandum Detention Centre, multiple reports have highlighted an overzealously punitive and restrictive detention regime where detainees consider themselves to be “treated as criminals” even though they are not serving criminal prison sentences. Despite repeated recommendations from relevant experts, including the country’s Parliamentary Ombudsman, many important reforms have not been implemented.

The report highlights several key areas for promoting reforms, both at Trandum and in other facilities across Europe, including: placing immigration detainees in the custody of social welfare institutions rather than public security agencies; reforming operating rules on everything from food preparation to electronic communications; and shedding detention centres of carceral elements, including the aspect of guards and staff members and the internal layout and regime of detention centres.

Geneva: Global Detention Project, 2019. 86p.