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Homicide rates for Black men, Black women and Native women are consistently higher than for other racial and ethnic groups.

by Emily Widra, May 3, 2018

I wanted to compare homicide victimization across racial, ethnic, and gender groups over time, since this data is deceptively difficult to find in one place.

In the process, I found that the murder rate for Black men is consistently higher than the murder rate for men of all other racial and ethnic groups has ever been:

Controlling for gender reveals more complexity. For example, the rate of homicide of Native women is higher than the rate of homicide for Hispanic and Latina women, whereas the opposite is true for their male counterparts:

Overall murder rates have been declining since 1980 - when the total rate for murder and non-negligent manslaughter was 10.2 per 100,000 people - but violent crime is still a favorite talking point among lawmakers and newspeople.

What's important is to change how we talk about it. White victims tend to get close attention, while the murder of people of color is callously left unexplored. We can and should be investigating why communities of color suffer disproportionately high rates of violent crime, as these rates belie a lot of geographic and economic complexity. (To dig deeper, see Krivo and Peterson's study controlling for neighborhood disadvantage, as well as the Violence Policy Center's recent study of black homicide victimization.)

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Stark racial disparities in murder rates persist, even as overall murder rate declines

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by Emily Widra, May 3, 2018 I wanted to compare homicide victimization across racial, ethnic, and gender groups over time, since this data is deceptively difficult to find in one place. In the process, I found that the murder rate for Black men is consistently higher than the murder rate for men of all other racial and ethnic groups has ever been: Controlling for gender reveals more complexity.

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Immigrants are always being threat about hurting their children or taking them away if the police are contacted.

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Immigrants are getting fired from their job or calling employers and falsely reporting that the victim is undocumented.

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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"

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“The truth is, immigrants tend to be more American than people born here.” ― Chuck Palahniuk.

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People with power may influence on people´s mind, the actual president of the US said in a conference that immigrants were invading the country. Not busting this myth, it’s only going to develop more hate to them, the citizens are only going to accept the manipulation from his president and follow his word. We need to make a change now, and this must start from the way we see our leaders.

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Trump jokes after supporter reportedly suggests shooting migrants

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Immigrants aren´t allowed to learn English or communicating with friends, family or others from their home countries.

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According to the CATO Institute, immigrants in the United States have lower criminal incarceration rates and neighborhoods heavily populated by immigrants have lower crime rates.

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Whether illegal immigrants bring a significant amount of crime to the United States is one of the most important questions to answer in the debate over immigration policy. President Trump also seems to think so as he launched his campaign in 2015 with the now infamous quote: "[Mexican illegal immigrants] are bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." From executive orders to major talking points to the President's speeches, which Vox reporter Dara Lind has aptly described as " immigrants are coming over the border to kill you," Trump is interested in this important topic.

It is difficult to know whether illegal immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans are. All immigrants have a lower criminal incarceration rate and there are lower crime rates in the neighborhoods where they live, according to the near-unanimous findings of the peer-reviewed evidence. Since 1911, large nationwide federal immigration commissions have asked whether immigrants are more crime-prone than native-born Americans and each one of them answered no, even when the rest of their reports unjustifiably blamed immigrants for virtually every problem in the United States. From the 1911 Immigration Commission, also known as the Dillingham Commission, to the 1931 Wickersham Commission, and 1994's Barbara Jordan Commission, each has reported that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

That research combines legal and illegal immigrants to calculate a crime rate for all immigrants, but the modern debate is over the crime rates of illegal immigrants. Most people seem to accept that legal immigrants have lower crime rates than natives. Measuring illegal immigrant crime rates is challenging for several reasons. First, the American Community Survey does not ask which inmates in adult correctional facilities are illegal immigrants. Second, federal data on the number of illegal immigrants incarcerated on the state and local level is recorded through the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), which is a combination of stocks and flows that is incomparable to any other measure of inmates. Third, 49 states do not record the immigration statuses of those in prison or convicted. Until recently, these data limitations allowed pundits to say anything about illegal immigrant crime without fear of being fact-checked.

Cato scholars have since published numerous Immigration Research and Policy Briefs to shed light on this topic. Michelangelo Landgrave, a doctoral student in political science at the University of California, Riverside, and I released a paper today that estimates that illegal immigrant incarceration rates are about half those of native-born Americans in 2017. In the same year, legal immigrant incarceration rates are then again half those of illegal immigrants. Those results are similar to what Landgrave and I published for the years 2014 and 2016. We estimated illegal immigrant incarceration rates by using the same residual method that demographers use to estimate the number of illegal immigrants in the United States, only we also applied that method to the prison population. We used the same method to also find that the incarceration rate for young illegal immigrants brought here as children and theoretically eligible for deferred action is slightly below those of native-born Americans.

The second strand of research from Cato looks at criminal conviction rates by immigration status in the state of Texas. Unlike every other state, Texas keeps track of the immigration statuses of convicted criminals and the crimes that they committed. Texas is a wonderful state to study because it borders Mexico, has a large illegal immigrant population, is a politically conservative state governed by Republicans, had no jurisdictions that limited its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement in 2015, and it has a law and order reputation for strictly enforcing criminal laws. If anything, Texas is more serious about enforcing laws against illegal immigrant criminals than other states. But even here, illegal immigrant conviction rates are about half those of native-born Americans - without any controls for age, education, ethnicity, or any other characteristic. The illegal immigrant conviction rates for homicide, larceny, and sex crimes are also below those of native-born Americans. The criminal conviction rates for legal immigrants are the lowest of all.

The Texas research is consistent with the finding that crime along the Mexican border is much lower than in the rest of the country, homicide rates in Mexican states bordering the United States are not correlated with homicide rates here, El Paso's border fence did not lower crime, Texas criminal conviction rates remain low (but not as low) when recidivism is factored in, and that police clearance rates are not lower in states with many illegal immigrants - which means that they don't escape conviction by leaving the country after committing crimes.

SCAAP is a flawed source of data for several reasons, but even it shows that illegal immigrants have lower incarceration rates than native-born Americans. Based on estimates of the non-citizen population going back to 1955, they are less likely to be arrested for homicide. Federal incarcerations and convictions reveal little here because they represent less than 8 percent of all incarcerations and, worse still, are not representative of nation-wide crime trends. In 2016, for instance, there were only 85 federal convictions for murder out of a nationwide total of 17,785 murder convictions that year, comprising less than 0.5 percent of all murders. Government immigration enforcement programs like E-Verify may even raise crime rates.

Cato scholars aren't the only folks investigating illegal immigration and crime. Sociologists Michael Light and Ty Miller found that a higher illegal immigrant population does not increase violent crime rates. Those two researchers then teamed up with Purdue sociologist Bryan C. Kelly to look at how higher illegal immigrant populations affected drug arrests, drug overdose deaths, and DUI arrests. They found large and significantly associated reductions in drug arrests, drug overdose deaths, and DUI arrests with no significant relationship between increased illegal immigration and DUI deaths.

None of what I wrote above will console a victim of illegal immigrant crime - and it shouldn't. To those victims and their loved ones, their pain is not diminished by knowing how unlikely it was to happen to them. There will be criminals in any large group of people and there are some infuriating and shocking anecdotes. The public seems to understand that the actions of a comparatively small number of illegal immigrants do not mean that they are more crime-prone than native-born Americans - which is what matters the most when debating public policy. A 2016 Pew poll found that only 27 percent of Americans thought that illegal immigrants were more likely to commit serious crimes than native-born Americans, while 67 percent said less likely. Among Republicans, 42 percent said that illegal immigrants are more likely to commit serious crimes and 52 percent said less likely. A Quinnipiac poll in 2018 revealed that only 17 percent of voters thought that illegal immigrants committed more crimes than native-born Americans and 72 percent of voters thought that illegal immigrants committed less crime.

Part of the reason why native-born Americans might not be concerned as much with illegal immigrant crime overall, but very concerned in some specific cases, is that most illegal immigrant criminals probably victimize other illegal immigrants. Of the homicides in 2015 where the relationship between the murderer and the victim is known, about 80 percent of murderers knew their victims. The relationship between victim and murderer could be even higher for illegal immigrants. Americans tend to care more when native-born Americans are murdered by illegal immigrants than when an illegal immigrant murders another illegal immigrant.

The debate over illegal immigration and criminality will likely continue until much better data are available across the United States. Based on the research above, I'm fairly confident that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. On the overall issue of immigration and crime, the evidence is so one-sided that even Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, has said that, "A lot of data does suggest immigrants are less likely to be involved in crime." This issue will be resolved when states and localities keep better records of the immigration statuses of people convicted in their states - just like Texas does. The crime data are so complicated and inconsistently kept that even the government misinterprets its own data. The government should resolve these data issues.

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Illegal Immigrants and Crime - Assessing the Evidence

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This issue will be resolved when states and localities keep better records of the immigration statuses of people convicted in their states - just like Texas does. The crime data are so complicated and inconsistently kept that even the government misinterprets its own data.

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Immigrant´s legal documents or papers that are needed in the country such as passports, resident cards, health insurance or driver’s licenses are beeing destroyed by people who abuse of them.

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The Trump administration's first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump's latest target is sanctuary cities.

"Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities," he said last week. "They're safe havens for just some terrible people."

As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that immigration drives crime? Many studies have shown that it does not.

Immigrant populations in the United States have been growing fast for decades now. Crime in the same period, however, has moved in the opposite direction, with the national rate of violent crime today well below what it was in 1980.

In a large-scale collaboration by four universities, led by Robert Adelman, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, researchers compared immigration rates with crime rates for 200 metropolitan areas over the last several decades. The selected areas included huge urban hubs like New York and smaller manufacturing centers less than a hundredth that size, like Muncie, Ind., and were dispersed geographically across the country.

According to data from the study, a large majority of the areas have many more immigrants today than they did in 1980 and fewer violent crimes. The Marshall Project extended the study's data up to 2016, showing that crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board.

In 136 metro areas, almost 70 percent of those studied, the immigrant population increased between 1980 and 2016 while crime stayed stable or fell. The number of areas where crime and immigration both increased was much lower - 54 areas, slightly more than a quarter of the total. The 10 places with the largest increases in immigrants all had lower levels of crime in 2016 than in 1980.

And yet the argument that immigrants bring crime into America has driven many of the policies enacted or proposed by the administration so far: restrictions to entry, travel and visas; heightened border enforcement; plans for a wall along the border with Mexico. This month, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against California in response to the state's restrictions on local police to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants charged with crimes.On Tuesday, California's Orange County signed on in support of that suit. But while the immigrant population in the county has more than doubled since 1980, overall violent crime has decreased by more than 50 percent.

There's a similar pattern in two other places where Mr. Trump has recently feuded with local leaders: Oakland, Calif., and Lawrence, Mass. He described both cities as breeding grounds for drugs and crime brought by immigrants. But Oakland, like Orange County, has had increasing immigration and falling crime. In Lawrence, though murder and robbery rates grew, overall violent crime rates still fell by 10 percent.

In general, the study's data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two, and that the 54 areas in the study where both grew were instances of coincidence, not cause and effect. This was a consistent pattern in each decade from 1980 to 2016, with immigrant populations and crime failing to grow together.

In a majority of areas, the number of immigrants increased at least 57 percent and as much as 183 percent, with the greatest increases occurring in the 1990s and early 2000s. Violent crime rates in most areas ranged between a 43 percent decline and a 6 percent rise, often trending downward by the 2000s. Places with a sharp rise in the immigrant population experienced increases in crime rates no more frequently than those with modest or no growth in immigration. On average, the immigrant population grew by 137 percent between 1980 and 2016, with average crime falling 12 percent over the same period.

Because the F.B.I. changed how rape was defined in its crime figures, that category could not be included in this analysis. Focusing on the other components of the violent crime rate - assaults, robberies and murders - still fails to reveal a relationship with immigration rates.

Most areas experienced decreases in all types of violent crime. The change in assault rates ranged from a 34 percent decline to a 29 percent rise, while robbery rates declined in the range of 12 percent to 57 percent, and murder rates declined in the range of 15 percent to 54 percent.

This analysis is one of the most comprehensive longitudinal studies of the local immigrant-crime relationship. It spans decades of metropolitan area data, incorporating places with widely differing social, cultural and economic backgrounds, and a broad range of types of violent crime.

Areas were chosen to reflect a range of immigrant composition, from Wheeling, W.Va., where one in 100 people was born outside the United States, to Miami, where every second person was. Some areas were home to newly formed immigrant communities; other immigrant pockets went back generations. Controlling for population characteristics, unemployment rates and other socioeconomic conditions, the researchers still found that, on average, as immigration increases in American metropolises, crime decreases.

The foreign-born data, which is collected through the census, most likely undercounts the numbers of undocumented immigrants, many of whom might wish to avoid the risk of identifying themselves. They are, however, at least partly represented in the overall foreign-born population counts.

This is not the only study showing that immigration does not increase crime. A broad survey released in January examined years of research on the immigrant-crime connection, concluding that an overwhelming majority of studies found either no relationship between the two or a beneficial one, in which immigrant communities bring economic and cultural revitalization to the neighborhoods they join.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system. Sign up for its newsletter, or follow The Marshall Project on Facebook or Twitter. Anna Flagg is an interactive reporter for The Marshall Project.

In the recent study, Mr. Adelman and his team collected crime and foreign-born population data for 200 metropolitan statistical areas for the years 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010. The Marshall Project extended the data set to include 2016, obtaining foreign-born numbers from the American Community Survey one-year estimates and crime figures from the F.B.I. Uniform Crime Reporting Program metropolitan area data sets. When either foreign-born or crime information was unavailable for 2016, the corresponding 2015 data was substituted.

Some metropolitan areas changed over time, growing to include additional regions, or splitting into separate ones. The Marshall Project consulted with the study researchers to determine when a larger area was still an appropriate match to the original described in the study. When an area split into components, raw data from each was added to calculate rates approximating the original region. When no reasonable approximation to the original area could be found, it was marked as missing for 2016.

When an area was missing information for a certain year, that year's data was interpolated using figures from the closest year available. For example, crime numbers were unavailable for Chicago for 2000 and 2010. Data for those years was linearly interpolated using the 1990 and 2016 figures. Charlotte, N.C., was not included in either the 2016 or 2015 U.C.R. metropolitan area data sets, so data from 2010, the most recent year with available data for this area, was used as an estimate.

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The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant (Published 2018)

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The Trump administration's first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump's latest target is sanctuary cities. "Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities," he said last week. "They're safe havens for just some terrible people."

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consequences

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According to the new york times graphics, this graph shows the number of immigrant who entered the USA since 1980 and the number of them who are criminals, less than half. This shows us that saying that all the immigrants are criminals is not true.

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I think the actual USA president Trump used this myth as a way to convince American citizens that immigrants are the reason of all their problems, like crime and use minority cases of crimes committed by some immigrants to generalize and create a stereotype of immigrants as bad people.

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Donald Trump opened a political rally in Southern California last night by sharing the stage with activists who have lost loved ones at the hands of immigrants in the U.S. without legal status. While no one can minimize the pain associated with losing a family member, Trump's motive behind placing these families at center stage is suspect at best.

The fact is that Trump has aligned himself with America's most anti-immigrant politicians, some of whom hold hearings and bring forth these same families time and time again in an attempt to stir up anti-immigrant fervor by playing on emotions rather than relying upon facts. Trump is only the latest presidential candidate to advocate for the draconian immigration policies designed by the nativist fringe of his party. Trump's plan for the mass round up and deportation of undocumented immigrants is not unique to him. These echo presidential candidate Mitt Romney's losing self-deportation scheme. Unsurprisingly, Trump's empathy does not extend to the millions non-violent and non-threatening individuals he would deport and rip away from their families; or the friends and family members who would feel the toll of their expulsion most keenly.

And despite the overwhelming evidence that immigration is not linked to higher crime rates and that immigrants are less likely to be criminals than the native-born, Trump, like many before him, is playing to fears and prejudices about what some imagine immigrants to be. Sadly, far too many immigration policies have been drafted on the basis of stereotypes rather than substance and Trump's immigration policy agenda will likely be no different.

As explained in The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States, there is abundant evidence that immigration is not linked to higher crime rates and hasn't been for the past century. In fact, data shows that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and immigrants are less likely than the native-born to be serious criminals. In fact, high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime. The analysis of population and FBI data indicates that between 1990 and 2013, the violent crime rate in the United States declined 48 percent. This included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41 percent, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary.

Our nation is safer when everyone is accounted for and fully documented. Our communities would benefit from policies designed to update our immigration system, policies that would ensure every person in this country is "on the grid" of U.S. life-with driver's licenses, social security numbers, and other forms of identification.

However, Trump seems uninterested in advancing sane and reasonable policies or working toward practical solutions that would benefit everyone in the country. He'd rather scapegoat the millions of immigrants who represent a threat to no one.

Photo by Allison Turrell.

FILED UNDER: Donald Trump, Election 2016, featured, self-deporatation

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Sorry Donald Trump, Immigration is Still Associated with Less Crime and Safer Communities

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There is abundant evidence that immigration is not linked to higher crime rates and hasn't been for the past century. In fact, data shows that immigration is associated with lower crime rates and immigrants are less likely than the native-born to be serious criminals.