The Examiner has a piece from Jeralyn Merritt claiming “there is no immigrant crime wave.” As evidence, the writer says only 4 percent of prisoners in 2006 were noncitizens.

It’s true that immigrants tend not to commit crimes. But even if there’s no “immigrant crime wave,” immigration does cause an increase in the crime rate: Immigrants’ children commit more crimes than the kids of the native-born. Being in a new country is scary enough to make people behave, but kids tend to assimilate to whatever norms they grow up around, including inner-city ones.

Of course, Hispanics represent the biggest immigrant group and the main cause for crime concern. Hispanics account for about 14 percent of the population. Virtually all have arrived since the 1965 immigration law, and of course the more recent uptick in illegal immigration contributed greatly. Most Hispanics are immigrants or recent descendants of them.

Fifteen percent of the prison population is Hispanic, which doesn’t look like much of an over-representation until one realizes it’s offset by the even greater over-representation of blacks. Hispanics account for 16 percent of the non-black U.S. population but about 25 percent of non-black prison inmates.

At the end of 2005 there were “1,244 Hispanic male inmates per 100,000 Hispanic males and 471 white male inmates per 100,000 white males.” More than 1 in 100 Hispanic males are incarcerated at any given time, more than 2.6 times the rate for whites. That’s nothing our immigration policy should take into consideration!

Merritt herself gives another reason we’d expect prisons to hold few immigrants, even if immigration does cause increased crime:

We have effective laws for the removal of noncitizens who are convicted of crime.