Immigration up, crime rate down, expert finds

“When Harvard professor Robert Sampson recently looked conventional wisdom in the eye by proclaiming the results of his work in the pages of The New York Times, well, he got his eye poked.

Sampson found that immigrants are 45 percent less likely than third-generation Americans to commit crimes. Then he compared immigration rates _ which have increased 50 percent in the past decade _ to the homicide rate, which plummeted in that time. In his opinion piece for the Times, he suggested that increased immigration is somehow related to a lower crime rate.

“Let’s say I got a considerable amount of hate mail,” Sampson said. “But no one can dispute that immigration is up and the crime rate is down. We can argue about how much of it has to do with the economy, family structure and other factors. But the patterns are the patterns.”"

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