Full Article | ArchiveWe have a new study on whether there’s an association between crime and undocumented immigrants. Today the New York Times reports on the change in crime vs. the change in undocumented immigrants in about a hundred metro areas across the country over the period 2007-2016. In general, of course, crime rates have fallen during that time. But have they fallen more or less in areas with big growth in undocumented immigrants? Here are the results:
The headline here is correct: you certainly can’t say that crime goes up when undocumented immigration increases, but you can’t really say it goes down either. The trendline is basically flat given the quality of the data we have.
This has always made sense. The vast majority of undocumented immigrants come to America to work. The last thing they want is a run-in with the law, even for the most trivial offense. They have far more incentive to avoid criminal behavior than native Americans do.
This study is just a correlation between populations, so it’s inherently not foolproof and it certainly won’t stop the argument about illegal immigration and crime. That said, there are lots of other studies out there that have come to much the same conclusion. None of them are perfect, but put them all together and it’s pretty clear that there’s really nothing here. Undocumented immigrants don’t commit crimes any more than us native Americans do.
Oh, bless your hearts. That's an adorable article and the study you conducted is even cuter. Sorry though, if you spend a few minutes poring over the 2018 Annual Report from the United States Sentencing Commission then none of this bleeding-heart propaganda will make sense. For example: 54.3% of the 69,425 federal offenders last year were Hispanic ( pg. 48 ), and 42.7% of offenders were non-citizens (pg. 52). The two largest offense categories were immigration (34.4%) and drugs (28.1%) (pg. 45).
It could easily be retorted the overwhelming number of non-citizen offenders are only in "the system" due to immigration violations, which is self-fulfilling and doesn't particularly prove that they commit more crimes than the general population, and that's true, but it's missing the point: Most U.S. attorneys won't bother to waste the time and money it takes to prosecute an illegal for a standard immigration charge unless they believe they're involved in trafficking for the Cartels, or have committed other crimes apart from simply border-hopping. There's just no sense in clogging up the system with every single person who hops the fence if you're going to throw them back over it, anyways.
The reason you see so many immigration violations instead of all of these other charges is because an immigration violation is open-and-shut. You essentially have a 100% conviction rate, so you don't need to fuck around with all of the other charges. "You hopped the fence, you weren't supposed to, you're out." This is largely due to the "Fast Track" procedure from 2012 (Thanks, Obama?), which gave the DOJ a streamlined system to start throwing people back over the fence because so fucking many people kept coming in. It's just a way to save time and resources in a system that's getting clogged with more and more people by the day.
I appreciate the attempt that Mother Jones, the New York Times and the Marshall Project made in slapping all of these graphs together, but I'm sorry, it doesn't line up with the data. When 42.7% of all Federal offenses in the country come from illegal immigrants, there very much is a link between crime and "undocumented" immigrants. Pretending that it's all flowers and rainbows while the cartels run barrel-loads of meth across the border isn't helping anyone.
...Well, it's helping the cartels, I guess.
