The Washington post Reports
Two charts demolish the notion that immigrants here illegally commit more crime
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen this month. (Olivier Douliery/Pool/Getty Images)
The
Trump administration's hard-line immigration policies are predicated,
in part, upon the notion that immigrants who are in the country
illegally represent a threat to public safety.
The White House, for instance, has sent out regular email blasts to reporters with alarmist accounts of crime committed by undocumented immigrants. President Trump has frequently exaggerated the threat posed by MS-13, a criminal gang originating in Los Angeles whose members tend to be from Central American countries. On Tuesday he wrote on Twitter,
without evidence, that Democrats "don’t care about crime and want
illegal immigrants, no matter how bad they may be, to pour into and
infest our Country, like MS-13."
But the
social-science research on immigration and crime is clear: Undocumented
immigrants are considerably less likely to commit crime than native-born
citizens, with immigrants legally in the United States even less likely
to do so. A number of studies published in the past several months
clearly illustrate the consensus.
The first study, published by the libertarian Cato Institute in February, examines criminal conviction data for 2015 provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety. It found that native-born residents were much more likely to be convicted of a crime than immigrants in the country legally or illegally.
"As
a percentage of their respective populations, there were 56 percent
fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of native-born
Americans in Texas in 2015," author Alex Nowrasteh writes. "The criminal
conviction rate for legal immigrants was about 85 percent below the
native-born rate."
The data shows similar
patterns for violent crimes such as homicide and property crimes such as
larceny. The study did find that immigrants in the United States
illegally were more likely than native-born people to be convicted of
"gambling, kidnapping, smuggling, and vagrancy." But as those crimes
represented just 0.18 percent of all convictions in Texas that year,
they had little effect on overall crime rates.
Another study, published in March in the journal Criminology,
looked at population-level crime rates: Do places with higher
percentages of undocumented immigrants have higher rates of crime? The
answer, as the chart above shows, is a resounding no.
States
with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tended to have lower
crime rates than states with smaller shares in the years 1990 through
2014. "Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states
are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of
violence," authors Michael T. Light and Ty Miller found.
That's
just a simple correlation, of course, and it's well documented that
many factors beyond immigration can affect the crime rate. So Light and
Miller ran a number of statistical analyses to more clearly isolate the
effects of illegal immigration from those other factors. Among other
things, they find that the relationship between high levels of illegal
immigration and low levels of crime persists even after controlling for
various economic and demographic factors such as age, urbanization,
labor market conditions and incarceration rates.
All
told, Light and Miller sliced the data 57 ways to see whether there was
anything they missed, but not one of their analyses showed any positive
relationship between illegal immigration and crime. They concluded that
not only does illegal immigration not increase crime, but it
may actually contribute to the drop in overall crime rates observed in
the United States in recent decades.
"Our study
calls into question one of the primary justifications for the
immigration enforcement build‐up," Light and Miller concluded. " … Any
set of immigration policies moving forward should be crafted with the
empirical understanding that undocumented immigration does not seem to
have increased violent crime."
These two studies are far from the only ones showing that immigration, legal or otherwise, does not lead to rising crime.
But the evidence they present is some of the strongest offered to date.
The Trump administration, however, does not seem to be listening.
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