Homework Responses Week 2

The article I have chosen goes into great detail about the correlation of undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities before they became a sanctuary city and after they became a sanctuary city. “Yet, it remains unclear whether sanctuary policies actually lead to increases in crime, as their opponents argue, or if they increase Latino incorporation and cooperation with police in cities like San Francisco, as their supporters counter.” (O’Brien, Collingwood, and El-Khatib, 2017). During the study, immigrants in these sanctuary cities were compared to native-born citizens and they found that more native-born citizens committed more crimes than the undocumented immigrants. After further study, it has been shown that there is no direct correlation between rising crime in the United States with undocumented immigrants. 

Later in the article when the authors of the study show their findings of their research with a graph that shows any change from the year the cities became sanctuary and the year after it became sanctuary. Some cities do show an increase of crime a year later from letting undocumented immigrants into the city and others show a decrease of crime. These studies were taken back in 2006 to 2007. 

I would like to propose a research on crime in the same sanctuary cities with updated information and also I would like to study if cities closer to the border of Mexico have more crime compared to cities that are not close to the border. My reasoning for these comparisons is to see if being closer to the border has any change in rising crime compared to a city more inland due to the running of drugs by the Mexican Cartel. In the article there has not been any mentioning of drug related crime and undocumented immigrants but I would like to include that into this study. The name of my proposed study is “Undocumented Immigration and Increasing Crime”. If given this opportunity, I will do my best to come to a conclusion as to whether undocumented immigrants do have an effect on increased crimes in sanctuary cities, and if so, which cities are more likely to have more crime. 

-Jordan

O’Brien, B., Collingwood, L., and El-Khatib, S. (2017). The Politics of Refuge: Sanctuary Cities, Crime, and Undocumented Immigration. Retrieved on November 11, 2020 from