POV: Enlisting State Police to Enforce Immigration Law a Mistake
Sarah Sherman-Stokes argues the policy undermines the trust required for effective community policing in this opinion piece for BU Today.
Reversing the policy of his predecessor Deval Patrick (Hon’14), Governor Charlie Baker announced on June 2 that the Massachusetts State Police will now be permitted to detain suspected noncitizens. Baker insists that without this collaboration he has “concerns about restricting law enforcement’s ability to do their job.” But enlisting the state police to enforce federal immigration law is a costly mistake.
First, federal immigration authorities know how to enforce federal immigration law, and in fact, they do so quite effectively. The Department of Homeland Security is the largest law enforcement agency in the country—with a budget of nearly $60 billion in fiscal year 2016. Under the Obama administration, a record 2.5 million individuals have been deported from the United States. Simply put, federal immigration authorities don’t need the help of state law enforcement in order to successfully do their job.
Moreover, the presumption that increased collaboration between state and federal law enforcement is necessary to keep our communities safe rests on a mythical premise—that noncitizens are more likely to commit crimes. But study after study has demonstrated that this is false. In fact, higher immigration is associated with lower crime rates. Between 1990 and 2013, as the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States more than tripled, to 11.2 million, FBI data from the same time period show a 48 percent decline in the violent crime rate, and a 41 percent decline in property crime. Other studies have confirmed that noncitizens are less likely to be incarcerated—that during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the incarceration rates of the native-born were anywhere from two to five times higher than that of immigrants.