Many of us with internationally adopted kids, especially internationally adopted kids of color and especially boys, live with the fear of how others' perceptions of our children will impact their lives.

Many issues of transracial adoption are discussed on various blogs here and in media elsewhere in the adoption community, and one discussion that comes up often is the common idea that children from other countries commit crimes when they get to be of a certain age.

Although it's hard to consider, our children may be considered immigrants (This had not crossed my mind until I began writing this post, and maybe that's very, very naive of me, but the two categories ... internationally adopted children and immigrants ... have not gone together in my head before.), and immigrants face stereotypes.

(A Google search for "immigration +crime" immediately returns close to 30 million hits. Try it.)

This new study, titled, "Debunking The Myth Of Immigrant Criminality: Imprisonment Among First- And Second-Generation Young Men," may serve to nudge some changes in those perceptions. (We can hope.)

This is a long report, and detailed with charts and graphs and lots of numbers, but it is worth a read, and possibly a bookmark. Some of the information may be handy to keep on hand.

Here's a bit:

In the absence of rigorous empirical research, myths and stereotypes about immigrants and crime often provide the underpinnings for public policies and practices, are amplified and diffused by the media, and shape public opinion and political behavior. Periods of increased immigration have historically been accompanied by nativist alarms and pervasive pejorative stereotypes of newcomers, particularly during economic downturns or national crises (such as the "war on terror" of the post-9/11 period), and when the immigrants have arrived en masse and differed substantially from the natives in such cultural markers as religion, language, phenotype, and region of origin.

... the incarceration rate of the US born (3.51 percent) was four times the rate of the foreign born (0.86 percent) ...The advantage for immigrants vis-à-vis natives applies to every ethnic group without exception. Almost all of the Asian immigrant groups have lower incarceration rates than the Latin American groups (the exception involves foreign-born Laotians and Cambodians, whose rate of 0.92 percent is still well below that for non-Hispanic white natives).

... In fact, immigrants have the lowest rates of imprisonment for criminal convictions in American society. Both the national and local-level findings presented here turn conventional wisdom on its head and present a challenge to criminological theory as well as to sociological perspectives on "straight-line assimilation."