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https://youtu.be/IS8NANWI-38

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🚫The myth we think is important to bust‼️

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🚫The myth we think is important to bust‼️

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¨The worst¨  people from other countries are coming to the United States and bringing crime and violence.

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“'The worst' people from other countries are coming to the United States and bringing crime and violence." What is your opinion? 

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“'The worst' people from other countries are coming to the United States and bringing crime and violence." What is your opinion? 

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Immigration reduces crime: An emerging scholarly consensus

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Immigration reduces crime: An emerging scholarly consensus

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Immigration reduces crime: an emerging scholarly consensus

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Value - This chapter represents the first attempt to synthesize recent empirical work associated with the immigration revitalization perspective. It will be of value to immigration scholars and criminologists as well as general readers interested in the relationship between immigration and crime.

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Fact Check: Trump's claims on undocumented immigrant crime rates. Here's what the numbers show.

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Fact Check: Trump's claims on undocumented immigrant crime rates. Here's what the numbers show.

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Trump claims there's high immigrant crime. Here's what the data shows.

President Donald Trump, speaking in New Orleans on Monday, listed tens of thousands of crimes he said were committed by undocumented immigrants, part of a pattern of statements he's made linking immigrants to crime in his effort to gain support for his proposed border wall.

It echoed his prime-time address last Tuesday in which he used the same numbers.

In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings. Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don't act right now.

Here's the problem:

There is no national database that compares crimes committed by immigration status. In fact, only one state - Texas - does so. That means there's no national database that breaks down crimes committed by native-born citizens or immigrants, or those in the country illegally, making it difficult to confirm or dispute the president's numbers.

What available studies do show, however, is that overall, crime rates are lower among immigrant groups than they are among native-born Americans.

The broader context: crime rates among immigrants are lower

Walter Ewing, an editor and writer for the American Immigration Council, a group that advocates for immigrants, puts it this way: "You can find any demographic group that you like and it's going to include murderers. You can look at redheads and blondes and it's going to include murders. But that's not the point, the point is what the crime rates are," he said.

Comparing overall crime rates for different groups is the best way to determine if a particular group poses a significantly greater threat than others.

"And if the likelihood is low, particularly compared to natives, then it's disingenuous to claim they're going to be a threat," Ewing added.

Alex Nowrasteh, a senior immigration policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, points to Texas as an example, since it's the state with the best data on crimes committed and counted by immigration status and was the subject of a recent report he wrote showing that criminal conviction and arrest rates for immigrants were "well below" those of native-born Americans.

Here's the breakdown:

Undocumented immigrants make up just over 6 percent of the state's population, legal immigrants made up over 10 percent, and native-born Americans make up over 80 percent, according to the most recent American Community Survey data and the Center for Migration Studies.

Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants were convicted of 5.9 percent of all the homicides in Texas, legal immigrants were convicted of 3.8 percent of homicides, and native-born Americans were convicted of about 90 percent of all the homicides in Texas, according an analysis of 2015 Texas state data by Nowrasteh.

In other words, native-born Americans were the only group over-represented among those convicted of homicide in the state.

The president has also pointed to Texas, citing -- mostly accurately -- numbers from the Department of Safety in a tweet over the weekend: "In the Great State of Texas, between 2011 & 2018, there were a total of 292,000 crimes by illegal aliens, 539 murders, 32,000 assaults, 3,426 sexual assault s and 3,000 weapons charges. Democrats come back!"

But the context is important here, too. Trump doesn't include a comparison to the general population's crime rates, and the numbers Trump cited are arrests, meaning all did not result in convictions. Of those charges over eight years, 238 undocumented immigrants were convicted of homicide, 13,559 for assault, 1,689 for sexual assault and 1,280 for weapons.

And that all, in the end, frames a bigger picture: undocumented immigrants are about half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans and legal immigrants are about 80 percent less likely than native-born Americans, according to Nowrasteh's research for the Cato Institute.

But where are the president's nationwide numbers on crime committed by those in the country illegally coming from?

Though the White House did not specify, the president is likely gleaning numbers from data released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that summarizes arrests of immigrants who are released into their custody and then removed from the country. But the information Trump appears to be using does not make clear what year the arrests were made, when the crimes were actually committed, and combines charges with convictions.

According to the data, serious drug and DUI offenses represent the largest group of convictions, followed by immigration and traffic offenses.

The 266,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants with criminal records over the past two years that Trump mentioned is a number that mainly includes immigrants who were convicted of crimes in the past, and perhaps served jail time before they were released into ICE custody.

As Nowrasteh puts it, "this is just when ICE gets them. It isn't when convictions happened."

According to the ICE data, over the past two years, there were nearly 4,000 arrests made for people charged and convicted of homicide among immigrants released into ICE custody for deportation -- but the homicides could've been committed over any number of years.

For comparison, just in 2017, a total of 16,446 people were murdered in the U.S., according to the FBI.

The same unclear time frame applies to the president's number on assaults, which likely stems from the nearly 50,000 people released into ICE custody in 2017 and 2018, who had been either charged or convicted for such crimes -- but who could have committed their crimes years ago.

As for the president's statement on sex crimes, those same ICE reports do not show 30,000. Even when combining the number from the ICE reports on sexual assaults with the separate category of sex offenses, that total comes to around 22,000.

President Donald Trump, speaking in New Orleans on Monday, listed tens of thousands of crimes he said were committed by undocumented immigrants, part of a pattern of statements he's made linking immigrants to crime in his effort to gain support for his proposed border wall.

It echoed his prime-time address last Tuesday in which he used the same numbers.

In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings. Over the years, thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don't act right now.

Here's the problem:

There is no national database that compares crimes committed by immigration status. In fact, only one state - Texas - does so. That means there's no national database that breaks down crimes committed by native-born citizens or immigrants, or those in the country illegally, making it difficult to confirm or dispute the president's numbers.

What available studies do show, however, is that overall, crime rates are lower among immigrant groups than they are among native-born Americans.

The broader context: crime rates among immigrants are lower

Walter Ewing, an editor and writer for the American Immigration Council, a group that advocates for immigrants, puts it this way: "You can find any demographic group that you like and it's going to include murderers. You can look at redheads and blondes and it's going to include murders. But that's not the point, the point is what the crime rates are," he said.

Comparing overall crime rates for different groups is the best way to determine if a particular group poses a significantly greater threat than others.

"And if the likelihood is low, particularly compared to natives, then it's disingenuous to claim they're going to be a threat," Ewing added.

Alex Nowrasteh, a senior immigration policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, points to Texas as an example, since it's the state with the best data on crimes committed and counted by immigration status and was the subject of a recent report he wrote showing that criminal conviction and arrest rates for immigrants were "well below" those of native-born Americans.

Here's the breakdown:

Undocumented immigrants make up just over 6 percent of the state's population, legal immigrants made up over 10 percent, and native-born Americans make up over 80 percent, according to the most recent American Community Survey data and the Center for Migration Studies.

Meanwhile, undocumented immigrants were convicted of 5.9 percent of all the homicides in Texas, legal immigrants were convicted of 3.8 percent of homicides, and native-born Americans were convicted of about 90 percent of all the homicides in Texas, according an analysis of 2015 Texas state data by Nowrasteh.

In other words, native-born Americans were the only group over-represented among those convicted of homicide in the state.

The president has also pointed to Texas, citing -- mostly accurately -- numbers from the Department of Safety in a tweet over the weekend: "In the Great State of Texas, between 2011 & 2018, there were a total of 292,000 crimes by illegal aliens, 539 murders, 32,000 assaults, 3,426 sexual assault s and 3,000 weapons charges. Democrats come back!"

But the context is important here, too. Trump doesn't include a comparison to the general population's crime rates, and the numbers Trump cited are arrests, meaning all did not result in convictions. Of those charges over eight years, 238 undocumented immigrants were convicted of homicide, 13,559 for assault, 1,689 for sexual assault and 1,280 for weapons.

And that all, in the end, frames a bigger picture: undocumented immigrants are about half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans and legal immigrants are about 80 percent less likely than native-born Americans, according to Nowrasteh's research for the Cato Institute.

But where are the president's nationwide numbers on crime committed by those in the country illegally coming from?

Though the White House did not specify, the president is likely gleaning numbers from data released by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that summarizes arrests of immigrants who are released into their custody and then removed from the country. But the information Trump appears to be using does not make clear what year the arrests were made, when the crimes were actually committed, and combines charges with convictions.

According to the data, serious drug and DUI offenses represent the largest group of convictions, followed by immigration and traffic offenses.

The 266,000 arrests of undocumented immigrants with criminal records over the past two years that Trump mentioned is a number that mainly includes immigrants who were convicted of crimes in the past, and perhaps served jail time before they were released into ICE custody.

As Nowrasteh puts it, "this is just when ICE gets them. It isn't when convictions happened."

According to the ICE data, over the past two years, there were nearly 4,000 arrests made for people charged and convicted of homicide among immigrants released into ICE custody for deportation -- but the homicides could've been committed over any number of years.

For comparison, just in 2017, a total of 16,446 people were murdered in the U.S., according to the FBI.

The same unclear time frame applies to the president's number on assaults, which likely stems from the nearly 50,000 people released into ICE custody in 2017 and 2018, who had been either charged or convicted for such crimes -- but who could have committed their crimes years ago.

As for the president's statement on sex crimes, those same ICE reports do not show 30,000. Even when combining the number from the ICE reports on sexual assaults with the separate category of sex offenses, that total comes to around 22,000.

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Fact Check: Trump's claims on undocumented immigrant crime rates. Here's what the numbers show.

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Trump claims there's high immigrant crime. Here's what the data shows. President Donald Trump, speaking in New Orleans on Monday, listed tens of thousands of crimes he said were committed by undocumented immigrants, part of a pattern of statements he's made linking immigrants to crime in his effort to gain support for his proposed border wall.

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Since 1980, the share of the US population that is foreign born has doubled, rising from just over 6% in 1980 to over 12% in 2010. Compounding this demographic shift, the share of the foreign born population of Mexican origin also doubled, leading to a quadrupling of the fraction of US residents who are immigrants from Mexico. A majority of recent immigrants of Mexican origin living in the United states are thought to be undocumented, leading to a contentious policy debate concerning the collateral consequences of this particular type of immigration. Indeed a narrow majority of US natives indicate a belief that Mexican immigration increases crime in the United States.

It stands to reason that immigration is neither automatically good nor bad. Depending on who the migrants are, it is easy to see how immigration could either increase or decrease US crime rates. Every country has had a different experience with immigration and sometimes the experience varies with immigrants' country of origin. So what has our experience been with Mexican immigration?

Theory offers little guidance in sorting out the effect of either Mexican immigration specifically or immigration, more generally, on crime. On the one hand, Mexican immigrants, on average, possess demographic chracteristics, which, in the US native population, appear to be positively associated with crime. In particular, they are more likely to be young and male and have considerably lower earnings than other US residents. On the other hand, there is a multitude of evidence that immigrants are positively selected on the basis of ability, face higher costs of punishment and bring with them abundant social capital that is protective of participation in crime.

From an empirical standpoint, the relationship between immigration and crime is difficult to disentangle. Data on the nationality of state prisoners are unreliable and municipal police departments do not systematically collect information on the birthplace of individuals they arrest. Another strategy is to see what happens to crime in a US city when more immigrants arrive. This too is difficult because the timing of immigration to the US is hardly random. Migrants come to take advantge of job opportunities and it could well be the case that migrants arrive in the United States when crime markets are in a state of flux for reasons that have nothing to do with the immigrants themselves.

If we could transform the United States into a research laboratory, what we would like to be able to do is assign each US city a different number of migrants in each year and then observe what happens to that city's crime rate in the following years. The idea is motivated by the concept of the randomized controlled trial in medicine - the idea that we can draw inferences about the efficacy of a treatment or a drug by randomly assigning patients to either take the drug or take a placebo pill.

Over the past decade researchers have identified several natural experiments, which can be used to understand the effect of increases in Mexican immigration on crime. By leveraging unanticipated weather shocks in Mexico which wreak havoc on local agriculture and thus spur migration to the United States and taking advantage of the considerable regional variation in Mexico's demographic transition decades ago, scholars have identified conditions under which the receipt of Mexican immigrants in US cities appears to be arbitrary - that is, not a function of local economic or crime conditions.

The results of this research offer little evidence that Mexican immigration increases crime in the United States. If anything, there is some evidence that crime declines after immigrants arrive. These findings are supported by research from the Public Policy Institute of California on the composition of inmates in California prisons, which reveals that Mexican immigrants are dramatically underrepresented in the state prison system.

For those who are skeptical that these findings are true, consider the case of El Paso, Texas a working class city of approximately 700,000 people that sits opposite the Rio Grande river from Ciudad Juarez, one of the most violent and lawless cities in Mexico. More than 80% of El Paso's residents are Hispanic and the vast majority of these individuals are of Mexican origin. A large population of El Paso's Hispanic population are immigrants. In fact, El Paso has one of the highest proportions of immigrants among U.S. cities. Many of these migrants are undocumented. If those who fear Mexican immigration are right, then El Paso should be a hotbed of violence. As it turns out, El Paso is one of the safest cities in the United States with a homicide rate of 2.4 per 100,000 residents. Just a tiny handful of American cities have a lower homicide rate and most of those that do (San Diego, Chula Vista, and Mesa, AZ, for example) also have outsize Mexican populations. Incredibly El Paso's homicide rate is so low that it compares favorably to European capitals like London, Paris and Amsterdam, cities which have rates of lethal violence that are generally an order of magnitude lower than cities in the United States.

To summarize, while it is right for Americans to be concerned about the equality of the immigrants we attract, there is simply no evidence to support that Mexican immigration should be a cause for concern. If anything, there is quite a bit of evidence that the immigrants we attract from Mexico serve to make us safer than we otherwise would be.

References

Butcher, Kristin f. and Anne Morrison Piehl (2008). "Crime, Corrections, and California: What Does Immigration Have to Do With It?" Public Policy Institute of California Population Trends and Profiles, Volume 9, Number 3.

Chaflin, Aaron (2015). "The Long-run Effect of Mexican Immigrants on Crime in U.S. Cities: Evidence from Variation in Mexican Fertility Rates, " American Economic Review 105(5), p. 220-225.

MacDonald, John and Jessica Saunders (2012). "Are Immigrant Youth Less Violent? Specifying the Reasons and Mechanisms," The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 641(1): p. 125-147.

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Since 1980, the share of the US population that is foreign born has doubled, rising from just over 6% in 1980 to over 12% in 2010. Compounding this demographic shift, the share of the foreign born population of Mexican origin also doubled, leading to a quadrupling of the fraction of US residents who are immigrants from Mexico.

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Our legal system rests upon the principle that everyone is entitled to due process of law and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. But for far too long, the immigration system has failed to provide noncitizens with a system of justice that lives up to this standard. Learn about ways in which the immigration system could ensure that all noncitizens have a fair day in court.

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Our legal system rests upon the principle that everyone is entitled to due process of law and a meaningful opportunity to be heard. But for far too long, the immigration system has failed to provide noncitizens with a system of justice that lives up to this standard.

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Illegal Immigration Does Not Increase Violent Crime, 4 Studies ShowFacebookTwitterFlipboardEmail

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Illegal Immigration Does Not Increase Violent Crime, 4 Studies ShowFacebookTwitterFlipboardEmail

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The Trump administration regularly asserts that undocumented immigrants are predatory and threaten public safety. Immigrant advocates say that talk demonizes an entire class of people.

Now, four academic studies show that illegal immigration does not increase the prevalence of violent crime or drug and alcohol problems. In the slew of research, motivated by Trump's rhetoric, social scientists set out to answer this question: Are undocumented immigrants more likely to break the law?

Michael Light, a criminologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, looked at whether the soaring increase in illegal immigration over the last three decades caused a commensurate jump in violent crimes: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

"Increased undocumented immigration since 1990 has not increased violent crime over that same time period," Light said in a phone interview.

Those findings are published in the current edition of the peer-reviewed journal Criminology.

In a separate study, these same researchers previously looked at nonviolent crime. They found that the dramatic influx of undocumented immigrants, similarly, did not drive up rates of drug and alcohol arrests or the number of drug overdoses and DUI deaths.

"We found no evidence that undocumented immigration increases the prevalence of any of those outcomes," Light said.

A third study, by the libertarian Cato Institute, recently looked at criminality among undocumented immigrants just in Texas. The state records the immigration status of arrestees, creating a gold mine for criminologists.

Cato found that in 2015, criminal conviction and arrest rates in Texas for undocumented immigrants were lower than those of native-born Americans for murder, sexual assault and larceny.

Finally, a research paper appearing in the current edition of the U.K. journal Migration Letters shows that youthful undocumented immigrants engage in less crime than do legal immigrants or U.S.-born peers.

All of this comes as no surprise to Art Acevedo, the police chief in Houston, which has one of largest undocumented populations in the nation. The chief has been publicly critical of the immigration crackdown.

"There's no wave of crime being committed by the immigrant community," Acevedo said. "As a matter of fact, a lot of the violent crime that we're dealing with is being committed by people that are born and raised right here in the United States."

For decades, social science focused on the extent of crime committed by legal immigrants. These new studies are important because they're among the first to explore the link between crime and illegal immigration.

The research proves what Acevedo and others suspected.

"Having worked around this community my entire professional career, which is about 32 years, I know that the vast majority of them that I've encountered are hard-working. They're here to earn an honest living," Acevedo said.

But the new research may not move the needle in the immigration debate. Texas Republicans, for instance, have potent opinions about undocumented immigrants.

"I have no quarrel with anybody of any ethnicity, but I don't like criminals. And I think that not having people be citizens leads to criminality," former La Grange, Texas, City Councilman Arnold Romberg says. He's sitting on the courthouse square in Fayette County, where voters went for Trump by a 4-to-1 margin.

Ed Dykes, a local electrical engineer, says a crime committed by an undocumented immigrant is one too many.

"It's actually immaterial whether they commit more crimes or not because they commit additional crimes," Dykes says. "They are crimes that would not be committed. There are American citizens who'd be alive today if [unauthorized immigrants] were not in this country."

A recent poll showed that 7 out of 10 GOP voters in Texas support the proposition that all undocumented immigrants should be deported immediately regardless of whether they have committed a crime there.

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Illegal Immigration Does Not Increase Violent Crime, 4 Studies Show

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The Trump administration regularly asserts that undocumented immigrants are predatory and threaten public safety. Immigrant advocates say that talk demonizes an entire class of people. Now, four academic studies show that illegal immigration does not increase the prevalence of violent crime or drug and alcohol problems. In the slew of research, motivated by Trump's rhetoric, social scientists set out to answer this question: Are undocumented immigrants more likely to break the law?

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CATO Illegal Immigration and Crime in Texas

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Source document contributed to DocumentCloud by Amita Kelly (NPR).

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Empathy

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Undocumented immigrants commit less crimes!

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Undocumented immigrants commit less crimes!