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STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Sweden has intensified its crackdown on illegal immigrants after a failed asylum-seeker killed five people in Stockholm, but the move has raised concerns that more migrants will be driven underground to join a shadowy underclass.

In the past months, police have staged wider sweeps on workplaces to check papers, netting undocumented workers, sending a warning to employers and sparking heated debate in a nation that has been traditionally tolerant to migrants.

In May, police carried out their biggest raid so far when dozens of officers swooped on a constructions site in Stockholm. Nine were caught and sent to detention centers, while another 40 escaped by scrambling onto scaffolding and across roof tops.

Swedish authorities had already started to tighten up on illegal immigrants, but police stepped up their activities after Uzbek construction worker Rakhmat Akilov drove into Stockholm shoppers in April.

"We have an unlimited amount of work," said Jerk Wiberg, who leads the Stockholm police unit in charge of domestic border controls. A 22-year veteran who has caught thousands of illegal immigrants, Wiberg led the raid at the construction site in May.

After Akilov became another militant in Europe to use a truck as a weapon, Prime Minister Stefan Lofven made it clear that "no means no" for those whose asylum bids are rejected. Akilov, whose lawyer said he had admitted to committing the crime, had been in hiding after his asylum request was denied.

The Migration Agency estimated 10,000 asylum-seekers a year will choose to disappear rather than be deported. Up to 50,000 undocumented immigrants already work in hotels, transport, construction and restaurants, the agency said last year.

Migration Minister Morgan Johansson said that a "dual labor market ... where a growing group lives on the outside of society and remains in Sweden" after having been denied residency was unacceptable.

"It also increases the risk of them being exploited. We cannot have it that way," he said, adding: "One way is to go after the employers ... (using) expanded workplace checks."

While cheap migrant labor is welcomed by some small businesses, government officials and economists worry that the shadow economy undercuts Sweden's economic model, whose generous welfare provisions and high wages are built on high rates of productivity and one of the world's heaviest tax regimes.

Tough measures against immigrants go against the grain for many in Sweden, a country of 10 million which once called itself "a humanitarian superpower" that generously welcomed migrants fleeing conflict in the Middle East and Africa.

But attitudes appear to be changing and a 2017 study by Gothenburg University showed 52 percent favored taking fewer refugees into the country with 24 percent opposed. Two years ago 40 percent backed reducing refugee numbers with 37 opposed.

The anti-immigration Sweden Democrats are now the second biggest party in polls with support of around a fifth of Swedes.

The Social Democrats, the country's biggest party in every election since 1917 and leader of the governing coalition with the Greens, has been forced to balance its traditional left-wing credentials with the need to enforce immigration laws.

Despite political support for the crackdown and tougher rules on immigration, police struggle to enforce deportations. Between January and April police deported just under 600 people, a third fewer than in the same period last year.

Some of those caught were freed because detention centers were full, while others cannot be deported as they don't have passports to prove their country of origin or their home countries refuse to take them.

The government never discloses how many are held in detention centers, saying there are about 360 beds and deportees are normally repatriated within three weeks. The government has told the migration agency to add another 100 beds.

An extra 800 million crowns ($95 million) has been added to the police budget this year to bolster the clampdown, but senior officers say this is not enough.

In 2016, police made about 1,100 unannounced workplace checks, almost three times more than in 2015, and caught 232 illegal immigrants. A further increase is expected in 2017 as the net widens.Illegal immigrants are also detained through checks at transport hubs, on vehicles or after committing crime.

Deportations made up a small fraction of the 20,000 rejected asylum seekers who left Sweden last year.

"We have been able to increase the number of people who leave Sweden substantially. But we're listening to the police and we have paved the way for more resources and wider powers," Johansson said in an interview, adding:

"We will have to increase that number further."

Expanded police powers include workplace checks without concrete suspicion of a crime, to be allowed from next year, with sharply higher fines for employing illegal immigrants.

Immigrants themselves have been unnerved. When police burst into a pizzeria in the southern city of Malmo where Ehsanulla Kajfar, a 38-year-old Afghan refugee, was working in May he said he thought they were looking for "terrorists or drug dealers".

He was surprised to be handcuffed and placed in the back seat of a police vehicle as tax officials scrutinized the restaurant's employee ledger. He was told his papers were not in order and was taken to a detention center.

"Sweden used to be a nice country, even when I was living underground," he told Reuters. "Now although I have a residence permit from Italy and I am registered at the tax agency in Sweden, I'm still locked in a detention center."

Nicaraguan Hugo Eduardo Somarriba Quintero, 37, said he was wrongly detained in the big raid in Stockholm in May due to an error by authorities and then released. Migration Agency records confirmed the details of his case.

"But I've lost my job the company where I was working was dropped from the construction site (because of irregularities in not checking work papers properly). Now I am looking for work and there is no job for me," he tearfully told Reuters, adding:

"Before there was a lot of tolerance for migrants. Now the laws are harder."

Muhammad, a 22-year old Afghan who declined to give his family name, has been in hiding for three years in Malmo since his asylum application was rejected.

He has moved three times this year and never stays in a place longer than three months. All his belongings are packed in a suitcase and two plastic bags if he needs to leave in a hurry.

Muhammad relies on food stamps from the church and leftover food from restaurants and grocery stores.

He has learned to avoid the city center when there is an increase in policing and gets help from other immigrants and volunteers who work for asylum-seekers' rights. They warn each other of police checks and raids through text messages.

"Last time the police made a push to find immigrants, my friend stayed inside for 15 to 20 days," Muhammad said. "But I can't stay inside all the time, its too depressing."

Reporting by Johan Ahlander and Mansoor Yosufzai, additional reporting by Alister Doyle, editing by Peter Millership

Read the original:
Sweden intensifies crackdown on illegal immigrants - Reuters

The House of Representatives recently passed two laws to crack down on illegal immigrants in the United States Kates Law (H.R. 3004) and the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act (H.R. 3003). Both were prompted by the tragic 2015 murder of Kate Steinle by an illegal immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, and by the perception that illegal immigrants have created a crime wave.

That perception is simply untrue.

Illegal immigrants are not all criminals, as most immigration offenses are civil violations and not criminal ones. Civil violations in immigration law are punished with deportation, while criminal violations are punished with jail time. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that 66 percent of illegal immigrants who entered in 2014 did so by overstaying a visa, which is not a crime. Its difficult to prove in court that the other 36 percent committed a crime by entering illegally.

Fear of an illegal immigrant crime wave is sparked by the fear that they are overwhelmingly murderers, rapists, and thieves. In reality, illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates and live in places with lower crimes rates than native-born Americans.

Regardless, fear of an illegal immigrant crime wave is not sparked by the specter of people breaking administrative immigration rules, but by fear that they are overwhelmingly murderers, rapists, and thieves. In reality, illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates and live in places with lower crimes rates than native-born Americans. Far from perpetrating a crime wave, immigrants actually decrease crime rates.

Those who think illegal immigrants are unusually crime-prone tend to make several errors when making their case. The most common is to only look at non-citizen incarcerations in federal prisons. First, that is a bad measurement because non-citizens includes illegal immigrants and also legal non-citizens, so it is an over count. Second, federal prisons only hold about 10 percent of all prisoners, with the other 90 percent incarcerated in state and local prisons and jails.

Federal prisons hold prisoners convicted of federal crimes or crimes committed while crossing a border, including immigration offenses and drug smuggling, which disproportionately lead to foreigners being imprisoned. In May 2017, the last month for which data are available, 46.3 percent of federal inmates were incarcerated for drug offenses and 8.2 percent for immigration crimes. Imprisonment of non-violent drug and immigration offenders is not the hallmark of a crime wave.

Looking at all incarcerated prisoners in state, federal, and local adult correctional facilities provides a more accurate picture of illegal immigrant criminality. Based on census data, the numbers show that illegal immigrants are about 44 percent less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Focusing on prisoners between the ages of 18 and 54, 1.53 percent of all native-born adults are incarcerated, compared with 0.85 percent of illegal immigrants in the same age range including those incarcerated for immigration crimes and in immigration detention. Excluding those particular crimes brings the illegal immigrant incarceration rate down to 0.50 percent one third of the native rate.

This holds true even when you take race into account. Whereas white, native-born Americans are incarcerated at a rate of 0.90 percent, illegal immigrants of every race and ethnicity are still less likely to be incarcerated, at a rate of 0.85 percent.

American cities with more illegal immigrants do not have higher crime rates. Even immigration restrictionists like Representative Steve King, R-Iowa,admit that legal immigrants are less crime-prone than natives, but they also live in the same cities as illegal immigrants. This makes it difficult to estimate how illegals affect crime rates on the local level.

However, the evidence strongly suggests that they at least dont worsen them. A study of recidivism rates in Los Angeles conducted by two RAND Corporation scholars discovered that there was no difference between rearrest rates over a 30-day period between illegal and legal immigrants. While not perfect, this study is still broadly consistent with the others.

Federal and state governments do not consistently record the number of incarcerated illegal immigrants they should start doing so immediately. Regardless, the available evidence overwhelmingly shows that illegal immigrants are incarcerated at lower rates than native-born Americans. As for the supposed illegal immigrant crime-wave, the evidence for that remains to be seen.

Alex Nowrasteh is the immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute's Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Original post:
Illegal immigrant crime wave? Evidence is hard to find | Fox News - Fox News

LOS ANGELES U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he will not stand back and let the national murder rate continue to rise.

During a stop in Las Vegas on Wednesday, the attorney general said he plans to hire 300 additional federal prosecutors to fight violent gangs like MS-13, a ruthless criminal enterprise with roots in El Salvador.

The national murder rate has increased 10 percent the past year. According to Sessions, thats the largest increase since 1968.

Sessions was in the City of Lights to continue his fight against Sanctuary Cities. He said too many jurisdictions are still refusing to cooperate with federal authorities and are protecting criminal who, under federal law, should be deported.

SESSIONS SAYS SANCTUARY CITIES RISK LOSING DOJ, DHS GRANTS

The Justice Department is threatening to withhold federal funding from cities that dont cooperate with federal officials in enforcing immigration laws.

An illegal immigrant taken into custody. (Fox News)

"When cities like Philadelphia, Boston or San Francisco advertise that they have these policies, the criminals take notice," Sessions said in Vegas.

He said lax immigration enforcements leads to increased violence. He pointed to Kate Steinle, who was killed by an illegal immigrant in San Francisco who allegedly moved to that city because of its sanctuary status.

"Her death was preventable and it should have been prevented," Sessions said. "He walked the streets freely because San Francisco refuses to cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In fact, he admitted that one reason he was in San Francisco that day was that he knew the city had these policies in place."

SANCTUARY CITIES LOSE ACCESS TO FEDERAL GRANTS THAT REQUIRE COMPLYING WITH FEDERAL IMMIGRATION LAW CUE THE HISTORIANS

Right now, four cities, four counties and two sanctuary states are undergoing a legal review by Sessions, including Vegas, where he urged Clark County to cooperate with ICE. In all, he said, some 300 jurisdictions refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officials.

ICE agents, even in hostile sanctuary cities like Los Angeles, continue to target criminal aliens. (Fox News)

These jurisdictions, he said, are protecting criminals rather than their law-abiding residents.

He said cooperation will help the government dismantle gangs like MS-13, which is wreaking havoc across the country.

To take these gangs off of our streets, he said, we need cooperation between law enforcement at the federal, state and local levels.

More:
Sessions says when cities protect illegal immigrants, 'criminals take notice' - Fox News

This article first appeared on the Cato Institute site.

The House of Representatives recently passed the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act (H.R. 3003) and Kates Law (H.R. 3004) to tighten immigration enforcement in response to the fear that undocumented immigrants are especially likely to commit violent or property crimes.

Both laws stem from the tragic 2015 murder of Kate Steinle by an undocumented immigrant named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez after he had been deported multiple times.

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Debates on the House floor over both bills veered into the social science of immigrant criminality. The majority of research finds that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives and that increases in their population in local areas are correlated with lower crime rates even forundocumented immigrants.

Despite that wealth of empirical evidence, a two-year-old Fox News piece entitled Elusive Crime Wave Data Shows Frightening Toll of Illegal Immigrant Criminals by investigative reporter Malia Zimmerman was offered as evidence of undocumented immigrant criminality.

Ms. Zimmermans piece makes many factual errors that have misinformed the public debate over Kates Law and the No Sanctuary for Criminals Act. Below, I quote from Ms. Zimmermans piece and then respond by describing her errors and what the actual facts are.

Statistics show the estimated 11.7 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. account for 13.6 percent of all offenders sentenced for crimes committed in the U.S. Twelve percent of murder sentences, 20 percent of kidnapping sentences and 16 percent of drug trafficking sentences are meted out to illegal immigrants.

Ms. Zimmerman writes that those statistics are for crimes committed in the U.S., but they are actually only for some federal sentences in 2014 and not nationwide figures according to a report by the U.S. Sentencing Commission that is the primary source of these figures.

Travelers from the Middle East arrive at Los Angeles International Airport on June 29, 2017, where free legal advice was offered and activists protested Donald Trump's ban temporarily barring entry into the US from Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The ban prevents the issuance of visas to travelers from the six countries for 90 days and places the refugee-entry program on hold for 120 days. FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/Getty

Prisoners incarcerated in federal prisons account for roughly 10 percent of all prisoners in the United States while the other 90 percent are held in state and local prisons and jails for being convicted of breaking state and local laws.

Undocumented immigrants convicted of an immigration offense are held in federal prison. Thus, undocumented immigrants are overrepresented in federal prison because the federal government enforces immigration laws but only a small fraction of all those incarcerated for crimes committed in the U.S. are in federal prisons.

Ms. Zimmermans claim that 12 percent of murder sentences were meted out to undocumented immigrants in 2014 shows just how misleading it is to rely on partial federal data to make a point about nationwide crime.

This U.S. Sentencing Commission lists only 75 murderers sentenced to federal prison in 2014, a mere 0.5 percent of the 14,249 nationwide murders committed that year in the United States. Of those 75 murderers, Zimmerman claimed that nine were undocumented immigrants.

The small number of murderers sentenced to federal prison are not representative of the other 99.5 percent of murders elsewhere in the same year and certainly dont prove that undocumented immigrants are more likely to be criminals.

The federal government does not convict many people for murder, kidnapping, or drug trafficking because those are primarily the purviews of state and local governments. The figures for kidnapping and drug trafficking are similarly unrepresentative because they are only for federal sentences and not those sentences to state or local incarceration.

Furthermore, it appears that Ms. Zimmerman just copied these numbers from a Breitbart blog post written by Caroline May on July 7th, 2015 despite her claim that

FoxNews.com did review reports from immigration reform groups and various government agencies, including the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Sentencing Commission, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Government Accountability Office, the Bureau of Justice Statistics and several state and county correctional departments.

Ms. May claims to have information that parses the U.S. Sentencing Commission by the legal status of the immigrant offender but it is not publicly available.

Regardless, Ms. May did clearly state that the U.S. Sentencing Commission data only deals with federal offenders sentenced under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (SRA) and does not include other categories like state cases, death penalty cases, or cases initiated but for which no convictions were obtained, offenders convicted for whom no sentences were yet issued, and offenders sentenced but for whom no sentencing documents were submitted to the Commission [emphasis added].

Ms. Zimmerman should have also included that vital detail.

In the most recent figures available, a Government Accountability Office report titled, Criminal Alien Statistics, found there were 55,000 illegal immigrants in federal prison and 296,000 in state and local lockups in 2011.

Ms. Zimmerman misread the GAO report in several places. First, she got the years wrong. The 55,000 figure is the number of criminal aliens incarcerated in federal prison in 2010, not 2011. The 296,000 criminal alien incarcerations in state prisons and local jails is for 2009, not 2011.

Second, Ms. Zimmerman misreported the definition of a criminal alien which she claimed were all undocumented immigrants. The GAO report claims that there were 55,000 criminal aliens in federal prison in 2010 and it defines criminal aliens as [n]oncitizens who are residing in the United States legally or illegally and are convicted of a crime.

This is an important distinction because there were about 22.5 million foreigners living in the United States in 2010 without citizenship but only about half of them were undocumented immigrants. By lumping them together, Ms. Zimmerman makes undocumented immigrants seem more crime prone and legal immigrants less crime prone.

Third, the 296,000 figure was the estimated total number of incarcerations of undocumented immigrants over the course of the entire year of 2009, not the number of undocumented immigrants incarcerated.

An example will help illustrate this point: If a criminal alien was incarcerated for 10 short sentences, released after each one, and then incarcerated after each one then that single alien would account for 10 incarcerations under the SCAAP figure.

The American Community Survey (ACS) reports the number of incarcerated immigrants at a specific time. For instance, in 2009 the ACS reported that there were 162,579 criminal non-citizen aliens incarcerated in federal, state, and local adult correctional facilities almost half of the 296,000 incarcerations under SCAAP.

Thus, the total number of people incarcerated over the course of a year is very different from the number of prisoners incarcerated at any one time. Virtually everyone reporting the number of prisoners or those incarcerated in the United States at any given time uses the ACS method of focusing on a slice of time.

The GAO reports that there were 160,348 American citizens incarcerated alongside the 54,718 criminal aliens in federal prison in 2010. The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports different figures of 179,435 American citizens incarcerated alongside 30,336 criminal aliens. Historical Bureau of Prison data is unavailable but there were about 40,000 criminal aliens incarcerated in May 2017 alongside 147,419 U.S. citizen prisoners.

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals are being deported. In 2014, ICE removed 315,943 criminal illegal immigrants nationwide, 85 percent of whom had previously been convicted of a criminal offense.

Ms. Zimmerman again misunderstood and misquoted these statistics. Only 56 percent of ICEs 315,943 removals in 2014 were previously convicted of a crime, not the 85 percent that she wrote. She misunderstood page seven of the 2014 ICE report on removals.

That report does state that 85 percent of all removals from the interior of the United States had previously been convicted of a crime. However, ICE only removed 102,224 people from the interior of the United States that year while the rest were removals of unlawful immigrants apprehended at the border.

Many of the previous criminal convictions were for immigration offenses and not violent and property crimes. The 2014 ICE report stated that they conducted 213,179 removals of recent border crossers. Many of those apprehended along the border had prior criminal or civil immigration violations in the United States.

An internal report compiled by the Texas Department of Public Safety showed that between 2008 and 2014, noncitizens in Texas a group that includes illegal and legal immigrants committed 611,234 crimes, including nearly 3,000 homicides.

That quote is maddeningly unspecific and the original report is unavailable.

Facts about the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) report come from this blog written by J. Christian Adams at PJ Media, but that sheds little light. I found a similar blurb published on the Texas DPS website that describes similar-looking statistics over different years and what the numbers actually mean.

If that blurb and the missing Texas DPS report reported statistics in the same way, then the 611,234 crimes, including nearly 3,000 homicides are actually a count of the total number of lifetime charges filed against all of the noncitizens arrested in Texas from 2008 to 2014. They are not a count of the total number of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants from 2008 to 2014.

Thus, a hypothetical non-citizen charged with a dozen different homicides but who was never actually convicted and who was arrested between 2008 and 2014 would account for 12 out of the 3000 homicide charges. Only a fraction of the charges mentioned in the blurb actually resulted in convictions which is likely the case with the unavailable Texas DPS report too.

If the Texas DPS report presented its statistics in the same way as the updated Texas DPS blurb, then non-citizens did not commit nearly 3,000 homicides from 2008 to 2014.

In 2014, non-citizens were about 10.9 percent of Texass population. From 2008 to 2014, The FBIs Uniform Crime Report (UCR) system records 8,551 murders in the state of Texas. If Ms. Zimmermans characterization of the data is correct, then non-citizens would have committed 35 percent of all homicides in the state during that time period, despite being only about 11 percent of the population which would be shocking if there was any evidence to back it up.

Ms. Zimmermans plethora of factual errors should be corrected in her Fox News piece before they further misinform the public and Capitol Hill.

Ms. Zimmerman is correct that federal and state governments do not consistently record the number of incarcerated undocumented immigrants and that should change but her numerous errors in interpreting government documents and other bloggers have compounded the harm done by poor government record keeping.

Alex Nowrasteh is the immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institutes Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity.

Read the original post:
You Know Trump's Immigrant Crime Wave? It Doesn't Exist - Newsweek

The man charged in the death of a passenger in the van he was driving was drunk and speeding last week when he lost control of the vehicle, which hit a guardrail and a bridge abutment before it rolled and caught fire, a prosecutor said Tuesday.

Nemias Garcia-Velasco, 32, has been charged with motor vehicle homicide in the death of Silvano Torres, 58. A judge set his bail at $2 million.

When he asked for a high bail amount, prosecutor Ryan Lindberg of the Douglas County Attorneys Office said Garcia-Velasco, who is from Mexico, was in the United States illegally. After the hearing, Lindberg said Garcia-Velasco had been removed from the U.S. a total of seven times five "voluntary returns" in 2005 and following two deportation hearings, in 2009 and 2011. Lindberg noted that Garcia-Velasco once was convicted of having false citizenship papers.

Carl Rusnok, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said "it's not unusual" for people who come to the United States illegally to return several times.

Under a voluntary return, Rusnok said, the person is saying, "'Yes, I'm in your country illegally and, yes, you can return me to (my country of origin).'"

The vast majority of voluntary returns are to Mexico, Rusnok said.

Garcia-Velasco was going over 100 mph about 1 p.m. last Wednesday when he lost control of a 2001 Dodge Ram work van as he headed west on Interstate 80 near the Interstate 680 split, Lindberg said. Garcia-Velasco told officers he had consumed 12 beers the previous evening into the morning of the crash, the prosecutor said.

Garcia-Velascos blood-alcohol level was .243 when it was checked at a hospital following the crash, Lindberg said.

Torres was riding unrestrained in the cargo area of the van and was declared dead at the scene. Front-seat passenger Jesus I. Gonzalez, 16, was treated at the hospital and released the day of the crash. Garcia-Velasco was taken to the Nebraska Medical Center with severe burns. He later was released from the hospital and booked into jail.

Rosa Flores, who had been dating Torres for about a year, said she last heard from her boyfriend just before noon last Wednesday.

Torres texted her that it was too hot to continue patching a roof, and that he would call her when he got home.

That afternoon and for two days, she kept calling and messaging him, with no answer. She saw photos of the burning van and had a sinking feeling that it was the work van Torres used.

I was just devastated, she said. There are so many unsolved things, so many questions. I was so hurt, I was so upset.

Flores said she is angry that Garcia-Velasco allegedly was drinking and driving.

If he knew that he was drinking and he knew that he wasnt able to drive, why did he? she said. He didnt stop to think about the consequences of what could happen. Its not fair that he took the life of somebody else.

Torres was a loving man who spoke fondly of his two daughters and son who lived in Mexico, Flores said. Torres had documentation to be in the United States, she said, and had lived in Omaha for about six years after working in other states. She said she does not know Garcia-Velasco.

Funeral services have not been scheduled, Flores said. Relatives are waiting to take his body back to Mexico.

More:
Illegal immigrant was drunk and speeding before deadly crash at I ... - Omaha World-Herald