Unless there are local studies of the incarcerated population and demographics including language competency, it is difficult from a national level to account for everyone.
What I think we are entering into is an "Anne Frank" syndrome in the USA. When people can only act covertly in their lives all kinds of economies break out that result in adverse circumstances for them and the USA in general.
When the undocumented can no longer work openly, the underground becomes a real answer. That should be avoided, but, it looks as though anything goes now.
By Julia Dahl
The Department of Homeland Security (click here) did not provide answers to Crimesider’s questions regarding how the federal government would go about collecting this data from the nation’s more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies, but the order nonetheless begs the question, how big a problem is crime committed by immigrants?
Florida State University Professor of Criminology Daniel Mears says that “good data” focused on immigrant criminality - specifically undocumented immigrant criminality - is scarce. Determining definitively whether someone who has been arrested is in the country legally can take significant effort, and the result might not be noted in all law enforcement records. In addition, researchers often have to rely on arrest and conviction numbers, which may be misleading because they can reflect law enforcement priorities more than criminal behavior. A jurisdiction might see a spike one year, for example, if a police chief or prosecutor decides to prioritize enforcement against immigrants.
Despite this, Mears and others who study this subject seem to agree that most research indicates immigrants actually commit crime at lower rates than native-born citizens.
According to analysis of the 2010 census and the American Communities Survey done by the non-profit American Immigration Council, immigrants to the United States are significantly less likely than native-born citizens to be incarcerated. The authors found that 1.6 percent of immigrant males age 18-39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born....
