A new study has found that illegal immigrants are getting sent to jail four times higher than U.S. citizens.
According to a recent study by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, nearly 3 percent of illegal immigrants in Arizona end up in state prison or jail within a year — four times the rate of U.S. citizens and legal residents. The study also found that in New Jersey, illegal immigrants are incarcerated five times more often, and on the West Coast rates are triple that of legal residents and citizens.
FAIR based its calculations on federal government reimbursements given to states and local agencies under the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program for holding illegal immigrants in prisons and jails. To make the payments, the federal government must determine whether an inmate is definitely an illegal immigrant or not. FAIR was able to take these calculations and project the overall incarceration rates for illegal immigrants.
Within the 10 states FAIR selected to research, they determined that illegal immigrants were incarcerated at higher rates, per capita. To get their calculations the group researched the prison population in each state using data from the Prison Policy Initiative, then subtracted the number of illegal immigrants the federal government paid to incarcerate in a year. That provided numbers for both an illegal immigrant prison population and legal residents or citizens. FAIR then compared those numbers with estimates on the overall residential numbers for each state.
In each of the 10 states included in the study, FAIR found that illegal immigrants were incarcerated at higher rates. The gap was biggest in New Jersey, with an illegal immigration jail rate 440 percent higher, followed by Arizona, Oregon, Washington
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