Immigrant Love

A constant refrain among people who reject the conclusions of these studies is that "any reporter worth her or his salt should know that correlation can NEVER be assumed to be the same thing as causation." By itself, no, it isn't. But that's not all we're talking about here. Robert Sampson, head of the sociology department at Harvard, has been wrestling with the issue of immigration and crime, as well as the emotional reaction to his studies, for a long time. As he wrote in an e-mail the other day, when people are presented with evidence that immigrants commit less crime, that increasing immigration over time is associated with crime going down, and that "low-crime cities are chock-full of immigrants," they "scream that correlation does not equal causation!"

According to Sampson, "The correct scientific response is to ask why these patterns exist." If, as critics presume and assume, there is a direct causal relationship between immigrants and crime, then there ought to be correlation as well. But there's not. "And causation," says Sampson, "is irrelevant to the factual point that if you want to live in a city with low violence, immigrant cities fit the bill."

And yet—many people are scared. There's not much doubt about that. They're afraid, even terrified, by the wave of new immigrants that began in the 1990s, which is why the debate is so emotional. Even if we put aside for a moment the overtones of racism, there's a concern that new immigrants will somehow change the American way of life, which they will, as immigrants always have.

We're not talking only about Hispanics here, but they are by far the largest group. According to the same Pew survey, there are now about 47 million Hispanics in the United States, or 15.5 percent of the population. They represent the largest minority in the country, and about a quarter of the adults, according to the survey, are "unauthorized immigrants." Altogether, about 44 percent of the Hispanics in the U.S. are noncitizens, according to the Pew report.

Yet the most intense fear provoked by this population is tied to that tiny fraction—some tens of thousands nationwide—who belong to gangs. Not only do they represent real and indisputable sources of violent crime, they spread fear both inside and outside immigrant communities. What is worse, perhaps, they spread fear of those communities.

"The 95 percent good that may be achieved by immigrant populations is almost entirely negated by gang activity," Lee Baca, the sheriff of Los Angeles County, told me recently. "Law-abiding people who are not from the neighborhoods where the gangs reside do not trust those neighborhoods, and when people don't trust neighborhoods they won't go to them for any purpose at all"—not for commerce, not for culture, not even for high-school sports.