Crime

Illegal immigrants are, as a rule, not able to build up a stable career on the Dutch labour market. The ‘legal ceiling’ not only seriously hampers upward mobility, but also leads to unemployment and underemployment. At the same time, individuals without a legal status are not entitled to income-replacing public services (see chapter 5). It is likely, therefore, that they will look for alternative options. One option is to fall back on their family members, another – on which the focus is here – is to act outside the regulatory framework. The previous chapters showed that, in addition to formal and informal work, some of the illegal immigrants engage in criminal or semi-criminal activities. These activities include prostitution and street-level drug trading, which were so far treated as variants of informal economic activities. The present chapter more systematically addresses the question whether – under these circumstances – being active in the criminal sphere is a viable alternative for illegal immigrants. Are they able to evade or by-pass the legal ceiling, or does this threaten their position even more? The chapter is based primarily on quantitative police data, as collected in the city of Rotterdam, combined with information derived from the interviews with 170 illegal immigrants. The following questions are addressed: To what extent are illegality and criminality intertwined? Are certain groups of illegal immigrants more often involved in criminal activities than others? If so, in what type of activities are they involved and how can these differences be explained?

The chapter reads as follows: section 3.2 summarises the existing literature on (illegal) immigrants and crime. Section 3.3 concentrates on the conceptual framework, which draws on the concept of a ‘differential opportunity structure’. Section 3.4 discusses the caveats attached to the use of police statistics and how they are dealt with. Section 3.5 provides an overview of the findings with regard to criminal activities, which is based primarily on apprehensions as registered by the police. The central assumption is that unequal access to formal and informal opportunity structures influences the extent to which groups of illegal immigrants are involved in criminal activities.