The reason is simple. If you are an illegal alien, you could be deported if charged with a crime. And yes, that includes 2 years ago.
My suspicion is that crimes of passion woud be the same. A fight due to an emotional issue, murder when discovering your partner in bed with another, those emotional moments which can lead to violence.
An illegal alien may even curtail alcohol to keep a clearer head, thus resulting in fewer crimes of drunkenness.
That seems to be an interesting correlation: I don't want to get in trouble to avoid being deported.
In Italy there is statistical evidence that illegal immigrants are overrepresented in terms of arrests/convictions. That being said, the data underneath is often hard to judge without bias. Police is more likely to arrest and investigate an illegal compared to a local. Other factors include weighting for age and other socio economical factors.
Illegals are often young adults, male and financially weak: exactly the demographic that is more prone to crime regardless of its ethnical background or nationality. When you normalize for those factors you find out that illegal immigrants are not statistically likelier to commit crime than young Italian unemployed males.
Data is difficult to collect and even harder to analyze, and you can twist data to tell you what you want to hear. In order to really shape legislative action you need to invest in data collection and analysis first.
Right, one could forget they are migrants and conclude that crime scales with punishment. It's a mechanic oddly absent in laws? Size of sentences should really be a formula that takes in the count of previous instances weighted by how long ago they happened. You could even extend existing sentences if the crime becomes popular.
Deportation would also affect the statistics, in that it removes potential repeat-offenders, no?
The study doesn't mention repeat offenses, so I can only assume they sampled both first-offenders and repeat-offenders. If illegal immigrant offenders get deported rather than jailed, the statistics would be lower than if they were sent to prison and allowed to return to crime afterwards.
Yes, as far as I know most criminality follows a Pareto distribution, so consistently removing those who get arrested will indeed affect the stats here.
Friend of mine was naturalized under the Simpson Mazzoli act. He said while their application was being processed he and his brothers would repeat the same joke. One would say It's Saturday night! What are we going to do? And the rest would say in a sad chorus, 'stay home'
Personally I think immigrating to the US illegally requires a level of social skills and level headedness that is negatively associated with criminality.
My suspicion is that crimes of passion woud be the same. A fight due to an emotional issue, murder when discovering your partner in bed with another, those emotional moments which can lead to violence.
An illegal alien may even curtail alcohol to keep a clearer head, thus resulting in fewer crimes of drunkenness.