Cato scholars have since published numerous Immigration Research and Policy Briefs to shed light on this topic. Michelangelo Landgrave, a doctoral student in political science at the University of California, Riverside, and I released a
paper today that estimates that illegal immigrant incarceration rates are about half those of native-born Americans in 2017. In the same year, legal immigrant incarceration rates are then again half those of illegal immigrants. Those results are similar to what Landgrave and I published for the years
2014 and
2016. We estimated illegal immigrant incarceration rates by using the
same residual method that demographers use to estimate the number of illegal immigrants in the United States, only we also applied that method to the prison population. We used the same method to also find that the incarceration rate for young illegal immigrants brought here as children and theoretically eligible for deferred action is
slightly below those of native-born Americans.