| Immigrants are a net positive for the U.S. |
| Case-by-case data on crime rates among native-born American citizens, undocumented people and immigrants with some form of documentation can be hard to come by. That’s because no state except Texas breaks down convictions and arrests among those groups for state-level crimes — and even in Texas, it can take time to investigate the details of a defendant’s citizenship.
But last month, the libertarian Cato Institute published a detailed study that dug into these distinctions over the past decade, breaking down Texas homicide statistics from 2013-2022. The study found that the most homicidal Texans are actually native-born American citizens: The conviction rate for them was 3.0 per 100,000 people, compared to 2.2 per 100,000 for “illegal” immigrants and 1.2 per 100,000 for “legal” immigrants. The trend held for arrest rates, too, not just convictions. “When it comes to forming public policy and calling for mass deportations, we have to look at the evidence, the numbers, and they do not support the idea that there is an immigrant-driven crime wave in the United States — just the opposite,” Alex Nowrasteh, who authored the study, told HuffPost on Thursday. Overall, “legal” immigrants were 61.4% less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide in Texas in that 10-year period, and “illegal” immigrants were 26.2% less likely than native-born Americans. Just looking at 2022 homicide conviction rates alone, the most recent year studied, that trend held: 4.9 per 100,000 for native-born Americans, compared to 3.1 per 100,000 for “illegal” immigrants and 1.8 per 100,000 for “legal” immigrants. Criminal conviction and arrest rates for all crimes over the 10-year period, not just homicides, followed the same pattern, the study found. These findings matched a 2018 study by Nowrasteh, reviewing conviction rates of all crimes in Texas in 2015, that similarly found native-born Texans were more likely to be convicts compared to immigrants of all stripes. As for arrest rates, “per 100,000 people in their respective groups, there were more arrests of natives for homicide, sex crimes, and larceny than there were arrests of illegal immigrants,” that study found. Yet another Cato study, published in 2020, found incarceration rates in 2018 were lower for both “illegal” and “legal” immigrants than native-born Americans — and that was including incarceration related to immigration offenses. Similar studies found the same for several years prior. Despite hair-on-fire rhetoric from Republicans (and some Democrats) about the risk of terrorists coming over the southern border, Nowrasteh found that there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack by someone who crossed the border illegally in recent decades. Around 90% of illicit fentanyl is seized at border crossings — smuggled by people attempting to enter the country at a legal checkpoint — and nearly all couriers of that fentanyl were legally authorized to cross the border, including more than half who were U.S. citizens, NPR reported in August, citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data. In fiscal year 2022, 88% of fentanyl trafficking offenders were American citizens, according to data released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission. In fiscal year 2023, accounting for all drugs and not just fentanyl, 81.9% of convicted traffickers were United States citizens. Source: "The Big Lie About Immigrants You Heard at the RNC This Week" By Matt Shuham - Huffpost - Jul 19, 2024 Throughout the first three days of the Republican National Convention, officials have highlighted a surge in what they call “migrant crime.” But there is no migrant crime surge. In fact, U.S. rates of crime and immigration have moved in opposite directions in recent years. After illegal immigration plummeted in 2020, the murder rate rose. And after illegal immigration spiked in 2021 and 2022, murders plateaued and then fell. Over a longer period, there is no relationship between immigration and crime trends. The number of foreign-born Americans has increased for decades, while the murder rate has gone up and down at different times Yes, some migrants have committed violent crimes. There are more than 45 million immigrants in the U.S., and invariably some of them — just like people of any other group — will do bad things. Similarly, thousands of native-born Americans commit violent crimes in any given week. Trump and other Republicans have suggested that immigrants are especially likely to be criminals. They point to a few anecdotes. But the data shows the opposite: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. There are genuine issues with the border and illegal immigration, but more crime is not one of them. In reality, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the U.S. Immigrants have had lower incarceration rates — a measure for crime — than native-born Americans for at least 150 years, a recent study concluded. Undocumented immigrants have lower felony arrest rates than legal immigrants or native-born Americans, another study found. Source: "The Myth of Migrant Crime" By German Lopez - NY Times - July 18, 2024 “Under the Trump administration, if you came in illegally, you were apprehended immediately and you were deported,” Trump crowed {at the Republican National Convention earlier this month}, as the audience on the floor waved “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” banners. “That’s why, to keep our family safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.” That means that, campaigning in 2024, it’s tricky for Biden or Harris to state a simple fact: that their administration has kicked out millions more migrants than Trump ever managed to. Using the pandemic as pretext, Title 42 gave the president the power to rapidly expel migrants without the normal court process. During just his first two years in office, Biden used it to kick out over 2.8 million migrants. That’s a stunning number. In Trump’s entire time in the White House, his administration removed only 2 million people total. As soon as Title 42 ended in May 2023, deportations immediately skyrocketed to historic numbers. According to data analysis from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, Biden “removed or returned” 775,000 unauthorized immigrants from May 2023 to May 2024. That’s more than any previous year since 2010. (For comparison, Trump’s record for removals in one year maxed out at under 612,000 — and that was with Title 42 in place.) Source: "Trump Says He Wants to Deport Millions. He’ll Have a Hard Time Removing More People Than Biden Has." By JACK HERRERA - Politico - 7/28/2024 |
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