# Reports of the Immigration Commission, volume 36: Immigration and Crime (Senate Document 750, 1911)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/dillingham-1911-immigration-and-crime/

The Dillingham Commission's 1911 statistical study of immigration and crime. It reports that blackmail and extortion, though few in number, form a larger share of the recorded crimes of Italians than of any other group in four of its five sets of data, and that most gainful offences were committed more by Americans than by immigrants. Its nationality categories are the commission's, flagged.

Volume 36 of the Reports of the Immigration Commission, known after its chairman as the Dillingham Commission, is the commission's study *Immigration and Crime*, presented to the Senate on 5 December 1910. It analyses five sets of data: the New York City magistrates' courts, the New York Court of General Sessions, the county and supreme courts of New York State, Chicago police arrests, and commitments to Massachusetts penal institutions.

On blackmail and extortion it says: "While the number of cases of blackmail and extortion is not large, the figures from four of the five sources of data throw the Italian commission of these crimes into the foreground," and that in those four sets the share of such cases among the crimes of Italians exceeds their share among the crimes of any other group. In its summary of gainful offences (printed page 41) it states: "Blackmail and extortion alone belong primarily to immigrant criminality," after finding that burglary, larceny, robbery and, in most data, forgery and fraud formed larger shares of the crimes of the native-born. Its general conclusion is that "the data analyzed in this report appear to indicate a far greater commission of such offenses by Americans than by immigrants," while it calls it "likewise possible" that blackmail and extortion were "more common now because of immigration."

**Flag.** The report's race and nationality categories and its framing are the commission's in 1910 and 1911, and are quoted here as the record's words. The terms "Black Hand" and "Mafia" do not occur in the volume. This page records what a federal commission said about blackmail and extortion statistics; it is not evidence of any organisation.

## Sources

- Internet Archive (digitised copy, Prelinger Library): https://archive.org/details/reportsofimmigra36unitrich