At RealClearInvestigations John Lott challenges the common claim that illegal migrants are less likely to commit crimes than natives:
These gaps have led to broad claims that illegal immigrants have less involvement with the criminal justice system than native-born Americans. A review of the available data, however, shows that the criminal records of millions of migrants – the ones President-elect Trump vows to prioritize for deportation – remain unknown due to illegal crossings, lax enforcement, and lax data collection by federal and “sanctuary” jurisdictions.
In addition, an analysis of the available statistics by RealClearInvestigations suggests that the crime rate of noncitizens is vastly understated. A separate RCI analysis based on estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) suggests that crime by illegal aliens who entered the U.S. by July 21, 2024 cost the country some $166.5 billion. These criminals disproportionately entered the U.S. during the Biden administration.
It’s an interesting piece and I recommend it.
In addition it highlights what appears to be an increasing problem which might be called the tree falls in the forest fallacy from the well known thought experiment “if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it does it make a sound?” If the result wasn’t published in the media outlet you favor, is it true? There’s a sort of corollary: can you reduce crime by repealing the statutes against the crimes?
John Lott? Statisticians at MIT and Cal Tech used to use his numbers to teach kids bad statistical analysis, but it was politically incorrect so they had to stop. Anyway, notice that the question is are illegals more or less likely to commit crime than natives but he never attempts to answer the question. You get 4 or 5 anecdotal stories then a bunch of fairly large numbers with his mentioning only once or twice that they are cumulative numbers for the last 40 years. What he does not offer is a comparison of native crime rates to illegals. (OK, I got bored with the endless anecdotes and did some skimming so could have missed any, but even at that they must have been later in the article which is also telling.) This is very much an appeal to emotion and not an analysis.
Steve
Especially that people wanted by the law in the home country are highly incentivized to border jump to a country of wealthy victims, weak laws, comfortable jails, and anonymity.
We can’t stop it but we can make it hard as hell.
National crime statistics collection, in general, is uneven at best. I think that adds a lot of uncertainty in both directions.
I went back an re-read it. Nowhere does he offer a comparison between crime rates of illegals vs native born Americans. I am actually kind of shocked that Dave who seems to have some minimal grounding in stats would post this.
Steve
So statistical evidence of better social relations and legal compliance by illegals over native born citizens stands unchallenged in the minds of the Left, emotional appeals aside.
That’s actually good to hear, as it confirms my own experience with the Left as simply responding emotionally in support of the underdog in any situation.
Immigrants do smile, nod, bow from the waist, until they have superior numbers.
Come that day, the Left may actually support their own.
@Andy, the data isn’t coming from the FBI database that relies upon states and local governments reporting their crimes, which always has issues about compliance and translating states crimes into federal categories.
Homeland Security appears to be monitoring criminal charges in real time from court dockets and filing notifications to the court files that this person is an alien of interest. They are supposed to be tracking and removing these, so the “662,566 noncitizens with criminal histories on ICE’s national docket” are pretty hard numbers and that would be the floor. It wouldn’t include cases dismissed without resolution because ICE isn’t tracking them anymore unless they commit another crime because they have no obligation to track dismissed cases even if they were for something like “alien can’t appear at scheduling because contracted COVID.”
Thanks for the context PD, that makes sense. And yeah, that would be a floor, as many things never make it to court.
There are a number of categories that HS does not monitor including “gotaways”. As PD observes, the 662,566 is a floor.
“So statistical evidence of better social relations and legal compliance by illegals over native born citizens stands unchallenged in the minds of the Left, emotional appeals aside.”
A n umber of people have done the statistical analysis. In this case Dave offers Lott offers to analysis, just a bunch of numbers without context or comparison. This really isn’t a matter of being on the left or right, just doing statistical analysis ie it’s just math.
Steve