Meanwhile, Huckabee supports local political jurisdictions passing laws that punish undocumented immigrants, and he asserts those laws "protect the economic well-being, physical safety, and quality of life" for citizens in those communities. By using "physical safety" Huckabee frames this issue in the context that immigrants are criminals out to harm people. But the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) (Rumbaut, et al., 2007) reports that "Foreign-born Mexicans" had an incarceration rate" of 0.7% in 2000, "more than 8 times lower than the 5.9% of native-born males of Mexican descent." And while the "undocumented population has doubled to 12 million since 1994," violent crime in the U.S. has declined 34.2%, the IPC reports.

Moreover, according to the American Immigration Law Foundation (Esbenshade, 2007) local ordinances such as the ones Huckabee believes in (that make it illegal to rent to undocumented immigrants, for example) - if they conflict with federal immigration law - are...
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