INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS

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The association between immigration and crime is probably the most repeated and least supported claim in American public debate. A century and a half of data exists to test it.

The long series

A study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research reconstructed incarceration rates for immigrants and the American-born across 150 years, from 1870 — the first year with available records — to the present.

The result admits no nuance of trend: in no period of that series did immigrants record incarceration rates higher than those of people born in the United States.

In 2020, immigrants were 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the country, according to that same work. Compared specifically with white Americans born here, the difference was 30 percent lower.

The gap, moreover, has widened over time.

The Texas records

A study published in 2020 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences analyzed administrative arrest and conviction records from Texas, one of the few states that records the immigration status of those detained.

The results per thousand residents: immigrants, including those without legal status, were roughly half as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as the native-born. Around 40 percent as likely for drug offenses. Around 25 percent for robbery and property crimes.

Texas matters as a case because it is a border state, with one of the country’s largest immigrant populations, under an administration that has not been permissive on immigration enforcement. The data are its own.

A caution about sources

The most-cited data series in this area comes from the Cato Institute, which publishes annual estimates of incarceration rates by immigration status. Its 2024 figures put the rate at 1,195 per 100,000 among the American-born, 674 among immigrants in irregular status and 303 among immigrants with legal status.

The Cato Institute is a research center with a declared position favoring immigration openness. Its figures point in the same direction as the academic ones and serve as corroboration, but the argumentative weight of this piece rests on the 150-year study and the PNAS work, both peer-reviewed.

What these data do not settle

Aggregate rates say nothing about individual cases. Every crime committed by an immigrant exists, has victims and merits the same institutional response as any other.

Nor do they explain why the gap exists. The available hypotheses — self-selection among those who emigrate, risk aversion tied to losing status, age structure, family composition — are plausible and unresolved.

What they do establish, with the longest available series and with independent administrative records, is that the opposite premise has no empirical support in any stretch of a century and a half.

Why it is in this special

A community assigned a criminal propensity the data do not support carries a cost that is not symbolic. That cost translates into public policy, into enforcement budgets, into daily treatment, and into the rest of the country’s willingness to consider it part of itself.

Hispanic heritage includes that too: having carried, for a century and a half, an accusation the country’s own records refute.

Primary sources: National Bureau of Economic Research, study of immigrant incarceration rates across 150 years (Abramitzky, Boustan, Pérez and others), also distributed by the Migration Policy Institute. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020 study of Texas arrest records. Cato Institute, annual series on incarceration rates by immigration status, identified as a center with a declared position.

INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS

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A special on Hispanic heritage would be incomplete without the part nobody wants to claim. The documentary record places it somewhere other than where it is usually assigned.

Where it formed

The Congressional Research Service, in its report on the organization, establishes that MS-13 formed on the streets of Los Angeles during the 1980s, made up of people fleeing the Salvadoran civil conflict.

The same document notes it was constituted in part as protection against Latino gangs already operating in the city, among them Barrio 18. The «13» refers to the thirteenth letter of the alphabet, reflecting its tie to the Mexican Mafia within the California prison system.

None of that origin occurred in Central America.

How it crossed south

Legislation passed in the mid-1990s substantially expanded the universe of noncitizens subject to detention and removal, including those with criminal convictions.

Between 1996 and 2002, the United States sent roughly 31,000 convicted people to Central American countries, of whom some 12,000 went to El Salvador, according to documentation from the Washington Office on Latin America.

The Congressional Research Service records that the organization became transnational when members deported from the United States established its structure in Central America.

The receiving countries had institutions weakened by decades of civil war, with no absorption capacity, no reintegration programs and in many cases no prior information about the records of those arriving.

The structure did not migrate. It was exported.

Why the direction matters

The correction is not an academic footnote. It determines which explanation is accepted and which policy follows from it.

If the organization is a Central American phenomenon that entered the United States, the logical response is to close the entrance.

If it is an American phenomenon that was exported and returned, the response has to include what happened here: how it formed, under what conditions of urban marginalization, inside what prison system, and what effect deporting tens of thousands of people to countries unable to receive them produced.

The record supports the second reading, and it does so not from an immigrant advocacy organization but from Congress’s own research service.

What this piece does not argue

MS-13 has committed serious, documented crimes on both sides of the border. Its victims have overwhelmingly been people from the same communities of origin. Nothing above mitigates that or attempts to.

Nor does it suggest the United States is solely responsible for a phenomenon shaped by civil wars, institutional collapse, poverty and decisions by several governments.

What the record does establish is the direction of the origin. And that direction is rarely told.

The uncomfortable inheritance

Every large community produces criminality, and the Hispanic community is no exception. A special that listed only celebrable contributions would be promotion, not journalism.

But the uncomfortable part is not the one usually told either. The conventional version presents an imported product. The documentary record describes something else: a structure that formed in an American city, was professionalized in an American prison system, and was installed to the south by an American policy decision.

That too is part of what has to be inherited.

Primary sources: Congressional Research Service, report R45292 on MS-13. Washington Office on Latin America, documentation on deportations of convicts to Central America between 1996 and 2002. InSight Crime, organizational profile.

INCÍSOS SPECIAL · HEIRS

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A commemorative month does not describe a community. It defines one. The text proclaiming it contains that definition, and it rewards careful reading.

The month exists because it gets signed

The 1988 law authorizes and requests the president to issue an annual proclamation designating September 15 through October 15. Without that signature, there is no proclaimed observance. Every president since 1990 has issued one.

The 2025 proclamation was signed September 22. The period had begun on the 15th.

Seven days is not on its own a declaration of anything. Proclamations are signed with variable margins. But the fact is on the record and worth noting before reading the text.

What the text says

The 2025 proclamation recognizes the contributions of Hispanic-American citizens. It singles out Hispanic patriots who have served on the front lines of the military, in law enforcement and in border security. It speaks of defending national sovereignty and protecting the flag.

Each of those elements is legitimate. There are Hispanic citizens. There are Hispanics in the armed forces and in federal security agencies. Their service exists and merits recognition.

What matters here is not what the text affirms, but its perimeter.

The perimeter

The 70.1 million people the Census Bureau counts as Hispanic include citizens by birth, naturalized citizens, permanent residents, people with temporary status, asylum seekers and people without regular status.

The proclamation names citizens. And among them, it underscores those in uniform.

That is not a description of the Hispanic community in the United States. It is a subset of it, defined by two criteria: legal status and function in service to the state.

A commemorative text obligates no one and appropriates nothing. But it establishes the official terms of a recognition, and those terms leave out a substantial portion of the people whose contribution the same proclamation celebrates in the abstract.

The context of the signing

During the same period, other figures describe the state’s relationship with that population.

An analysis of immigration enforcement data reported by specialized press records 49,571 ICE arrests in July 2026, the highest monthly total of the second term, up roughly 15 percent from June, with more than half of those detained having no convictions or pending charges. The figure comes from a processing of federal data and should be verified against the original source before being treated as settled.

The Congressional Budget Office projects net migration of roughly 570,000 people for 2026, well below earlier projections nearing two million.

And a Pew Research Center survey from November 2025 found that 47 percent of Latinos surveyed felt less safe in their area because of deportation actions.

What remains

An annual proclamation celebrates Hispanic heritage. A simultaneous policy reduces Hispanic presence, polices it and displaces it.

Both occur under the same signature and on the same calendar.

No intent needs to be assigned to observe the contradiction. It is enough to place the two documents side by side and read the dates.

Primary sources: Proclamation on National Hispanic Heritage Month 2025, signed September 22, 2025. Public Law 100-402. U.S. Census Bureau, Facts for Features CB26-FF.07. Congressional Budget Office, net migration projections. Pew Research Center, November 2025 survey. Immigration arrest data processed by the Deportation Data Project, as reported by specialized press.