MYTH #4: Undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.
FACTS: This is a frequently repeated claim, but the exact opposite is true: both undocumented and legal immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens.

• According to a 2007 study by University of California, Irvine, sociologist Rubén G. Rumbaut, among men age 18-39 (who comprise the vast majority of the U.S. prison population), the incarceration rate for the native-born (3.5 percent) was five times higher than the rate for immigrants (0.7 percent) in 2000.
• The study also found that incarceration rates were lower for immigrants from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala-who account for the majority of undocumented immigrants. In 2000, only 0.7 percent of foreign-born Mexican men and 0.5 percent of foreign-born Salvadoran and Guatemalan men were in prison.
• A 2005 study by economists Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, concluded that lower incarceration rates among immigrants are not the result of deportation or the threat of deportation. Rather, immigrants are a "self-selected" group with "low criminal propensities."