From the Right Wing Cato Institute.
Our headline finding is that both illegal immigrants and legal immigrants have incarceration rates far below those of native-born Americans—at 0.85 percent, 0.47 percent, and 1.53 percent, respectively. Excluding illegal immigrants who are incarcerated or in detention for immigration offenses lowers their incarceration rate to 0.5 percent of their population—within a smidge of legal immigrants. As a result, native-born Americans are overrepresented in the incarcerated population while illegal and legal immigrants are underrepresented, relative to their respective shares of the population.
The relatively low number of incarcerated illegal immigrants places some immigration restrictionists in an uncomfortable position: choosing which myth to believe. The first myth is that illegal immigrants are especially crime-prone. The second myth is that there are actually
two to
three times as many illegal immigrants as is commonly reported. The usual number used by the government and most demographers is that there are 11 to 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States but a steady drumbeat of skeptics claim the real number is about 22 to 36 million.
No matter how you dice the numbers, a larger illegal immigrant population in the United States means that their incarceration rate is even lower that what
we report. Without adjusting for age, a total illegal immigrant population of 22 million would lower their incarceration rate to 0.56 percent using Cato’s estimate of the size of the incarcerated illegal immigrant population. Using the higher (and sillier) 36 million illegal immigrant population estimate by Ann Coulter lowers their incarceration rate to 0.34 percent.