A libertarian think tank is pushing back against press coverage that has portrayed so-called ‘Dreamers’ – beneficiaries of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program – as disproportionately prone to crime, saying they have a lower arrest rate than the general population.
Fox News on Monday ran the headline, “Thousands of DACA recipients with arrest records, including 10 accused murderers, allowed to stay in US.” Breitbart’s headline the same day read, “Obama admin approved 50,000+ DACA amnesty applicants with criminal records.”
These press reports stemmed from a data release by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), which revealed that 59,786 DACA recipients, or about 7.8 percent of the 770,628 people who earned DACA, have been arrested since the program’s creation in 2012.
The libertarian group Cato Institute took issue with the USCIS report because it did not provide the comparable arrest rate for other populations. Nowrasteh says the per capita arrest rate of DACA recipients is 46 percent below the non-DACA resident population and even lower when controlling for age.
“Controlling for age… non-DACA residents have an arrest rate about 2.7 times as great as the DACA arrest rate,” writes Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at D.C.-based think tank. This is 63 percent below that of the non-DACA resident population of comparable age.
DACA recipients are aged 37 and below, which means they belong to a demographic more likely to be arrested than others.
Cato Institute also notes that the report does not indicate convictions, only arrests. USCIS itself pointed this out, noting that an arrest is not a proof of guilt: “An arrest indicates the individual was arrested or apprehended only and does not mean the individual was convicted of a crime.”
According to Nowrasteh, the arrest rate is even lower if one subtracts out immigration offenses from the DACA-recipients.
USCIS data shows that 20,993 DACA applications were denied to applications with a prior arrest, while 59,786 were approved in spite of a prior arrest.
More than 120,000 DACA recipients live in Texas. The program provides legal protections to non-citizen residents of the U.S. who arrived in the country as children and otherwise would be at risk of deportation. President Donald Trump has ordered an end to the program. House Republicans this week negotiated a bill which, if passed into law, would give DACA recipients a pathway to citizenship.
Last year the Cato Institute published a study on a similar issue, the incarceration rate of ‘Dreamers.’ The study argued that DACA recipients are “less crime prone than native-born Americans.” Nowrasteh argues that the newly released USCIS report backs up the conclusions of the think tank’s study last year.
Photo: President Barack Obama with a group of beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Feb. 4, 2015. (White House/Pete Souza)
