It has been something of a broken record among the anti-immigration crowd: Illegal immigrants are running amok, committing crimes, getting arrested and jamming our prisons.

The biggest problem with the assertion: It's simply untrue.

In April, the New Jersey Star-Ledger newspaper looked at data from that state's Department of Corrections and the U.S. census and discovered, "U.S. citizens are twice as likely to land in New Jersey's prisons as legal and illegal immigrants."

It found that while non-U.S. citizens are 10 percent of the state's population, they make up only 5 percent of the state's inmates.

In February, the Public Policy Institute of California found much the same thing.

"Among men ages 18-40 — the age group most likely to commit crime — the U.S.-born are 10 times more likely than the foreign-born to be in jail or prison. Even among non-citizen men from Mexico ages 18-40 — a group disproportionately likely to have entered the United States illegally — the authors find very low rates of institutionalization."

The Immigration Policy Center, the research arm of the American Immigration Law Foundation, calls our attention to this data. It notes that the claim of criminal immigrants committing mayhem has been handily debunked over a previous century of research.

The findings bear repeating now, however, as cities and states, in the absence of federal attention to immigration reform, ratchet up punitive efforts to ferret out illegal immigrants and, too often, jail or imprison them as a prelude to deportation.

Usually, this claim about immigrant criminals gets recycled whenever a high-profile crime and arrest occurs and the culprit turns out to be an illegal immigrant. What this data indicates is that this is an anomaly.

It is simply counterintuitive to believe that the ranks of illegal immigrants doing jobs that Americans don't want to do are rife with felons or felon wannabes. It makes no sense for people who live in dread of deportation to call attention to themselves in any fashion, least of all by action that brings them face-to-face with law enforcement.

What the research shows is that this not just counterintuitive. It's false. Let's move on.

REPRINTED FROM THE MILWAUKEE JOURNAL SENTINEL.

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