Immigration advocates have long asserted that local law-enforcement agencies should not cooperate with federal immigration authorities because doing so would cause immigrants to avoid reporting crimes out of fear of deportation. This justification for “sanctuary” jurisdictions has always been dubious, but now we have data that directly refute it. Starting in 2017, the Department of Justice added a citizenship question to its annual National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which is the largest and most authoritative survey of crime victims. The 2017–19 NCVS indicates that the whole basis for sanctuary polices is a myth; it turns out that crimes against immigrants are reported to police at rates that match or often exceed those for crimes against the U.S.-born.
The NCVS is specifically designed to measure the number and nature of criminal victimizations, whether they are reported to police, and the reasons for not reporting, if applicable. Immigrants, typically referred to by the government as the foreign-born, are all those living in the United States who were not U.S. citizens at birth — naturalized citizens, green-card holders, guest workers, foreign students, and illegal immigrants. Noncitizens would include all of the above except naturalized citizens. Whether we looked at all crimes, violent crimes, property crimes, or serious violent and property crimes together, the survey shows that immigrants report crimes to police at rates that are at least as high as do the U.S.-born.
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