Immigration and Crime

I participated in a panel in my department today on Foreign Policy and the 2024 election. I talked about NATO and climate change -- will these policy issues influence the outcome of the election (maybe climate change) and how will the election results influence policy going forward.

Colleagues talked about Russia/Ukraine, Gaza/Lebanon, China, and immigration.

The last issue was the most controversial as the panelists had the deepest disagreement on this issue during the Q&A.

I feel compelled to fact-check some of the statements that were flying around the room.

Contra to alarming claims, the Biden administration has not had an "open borders" policy . The libertarian Cato Institute, which used to be reliably Republican, agrees. 

Next, immigrants do not commit "most crime" or even a disproportionate share of them.  A number from New York City referenced in today's discussion was essentially made up by "police sources" and reported in the tabloid New York Post.  Meanwhile, a more thorough dive by the NY Times this past February revealed quite different official data from the NYPD:

But police data indicate that there has been no surge in crime since April 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas started sending buses of migrants to New York to protest the federal government’s border policy.

More than 170,000 migrants have arrived in the city since then, and it is difficult to know what crime statistics would show had they not come. But as the migrant numbers have increased, the overall crime rate has stayed flat. And, in fact, many major categories of crime — including rape, murder and shootings — have decreased, according to an analysis of the New York Police Department’s month-by-month statistics since April 2022.

The story also quotes (by name) experts: "Jeffrey Butts, director of the Research and Evaluation Center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said that there was no discernible migrant crime wave."

Beyond NYC, the paper also referenced academic studies: 

"In 2023, researchers at Stanford University found that immigrants were imprisoned at lower rates than people born in the United States. In 2020, a University of Wisconsin-Madison study noted that undocumented immigrants in Texas tended to have fewer felony arrests than legal residents."

Going back years, I've referenced stats in my classes from the Anti-Defamation League that reveal much the same information -- immigrants commit fewer crimes that citizens. By the way, links in this quote are in the original and not all of them currently work. The bolded parts are also in the original. 

Study after study has shown that immigrants – regardless of where they are from, what immigration status they hold, and how much education they have completed – are less likely than native-born citizens to commit crimes or become incarcerated.

According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, while the overall percentage of immigrants and the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. both increased between 1990 and 2016, the violent crime rate in the U.S. during that time plummeted 48 percent and the property crime rate dropped by 41 percent. More recent population and crime data from the Pew Research Center reveals the continuation of this trend. Studies have consistently found that immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans and that there is a negative correlation between levels of immigration and crime rates.

Other studies have found that crime rates are lowest in states with the highest immigration growth rates, and that states with larger shares of undocumented immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than states with smaller shares.

The ADL also debunks myths about terrorism, non-citizen voting, public health, etc. Customs and Border Protection also post annual stats. While those numbers undoubtedly reflect growing border encounters, they do not show a great number of criminals coming across the border as a percentage of the total. This is a link to the obviously non-alarming crime numbers from CBP. 

 

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Firsts

Here are 2 striking paragraphs from a (free access) column by Kate Cohen in the WaPo earlier this month:

When [Kamala] Harris was born, 60 years ago this month, women could not serve on a jury in all 50 states. They had to have a male relative sign a business loan. They had no legal recourse against sexual harassment or marital rape. There was no no-fault divorce. They could get the pill, but only if they were married. They could not get a legal abortion unless their lives were in danger, and they could be fired for getting pregnant. They could not be admitted to Harvard College or the U.S. Military Academy or join their local Rotary, Kiwanis or Lions Club. Among the Fortune 500 companies, there was not a single female CEO.

To get to the point where she might become the first female U.S. president, Harris first had to become the first female district attorney of San Francisco, the first female attorney general of California and the first female vice president of the United States.

Many of my students are about 20 years old and do not know about events from 10 or 12 years ago. My guess is that even middle-aged adults won't realize the history mentioned here. 

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Republicans for Harris

In late August more than 235 Republicans who describe themselves as "alumni" of the campaigns or presidencies of George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney published a public letter explaining why they would not be voting for Donald Trump -- and would be voting for Kamala Harris. 

Here's a key part of their message:

Of course, we have plenty of honest, ideological disagreements with Vice President Harris and Gov. Walz. That’s to be expected. The alternative, however, is simply untenable. 

At home, another four years of Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership, this time focused on advancing the dangerous goals of Project 2025, will hurt real, everyday people and weaken our sacred institutions. 

Abroad, democratic movements will be irreparably jeopardized as Trump and his acolyte JD Vance kowtow to dictators like Vladimir Putin while turning their backs on our allies.

Earlier in the message, they blast Trump for lying about the results of the 2020 election and inciting an insurrection. They describe the crowd as "a mob of sore losers and sycophants."

I have an old friend who was part of the HW Bush administration, but I do not see his name on the list of signatories. From a conversation we had in the last year or so, I'm pretty sure he won't be voting for Trump. It's another step to say you are voting for Harris -- and to do so publicly as these individuals have done.

Incidentally, the list does not include Liz or Dick Cheney, though their positions on this are well-known. 

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Trump's Violent Fantasies

Donald Trump is back to his habit of fantasizing about the government (under his leadership) using illegal violence against criminals, immigrants, and/or political opponents. I blogged about this in 2019 when he was in office. I also compiled references to his violent rhetoric dating to the start of his first campaign in 2015 through 2019.

A couple of days ago in Erie, PA, Trump said something that sounded like the plot for "The Purge." It imagined a whole new level of violence:

"You know, if you had one day, like one real rough, nasty day," he said, during a section of the speech about how left-wing politicians are allegedly preventing police from enforcing the law, "one rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it'll end immediately."

Trump defenders say that the former president was speaking "in jest," but it didn't seem like a joke (watch below) and is entirely consistent with comments he has made over the years. Plus, populists employing similar authoritarian rhetoric have actually empowered death squads in various countries around the world. In the Philippines, for example, 1000s of people were killed by the police during a war on drugs and crime authorized by a newly elected populist right-wing president. A similar pattern emerged in Brazil in 2019 where the police killed 17 people per day, on average. 

In those deaths, the police act as judge, jury, and executioner. So much for constitutional protections like due process of law and prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. How is it conservative to abandon the bill of rights? 

If you want to skip straight to the quoted message in the video below, you cannot, because Trump starts with "one real rough, nasty day" around 2:15, gets off-track with a made-up anecdote about Kamala Harris (referencing a decriminalization law signed by Arnold Schwarzenegger years before Harris was elected to state or national office), and then around 3:25 into the video mentions "one rough hour, and I mean real rough." The first few minutes ramble through some complaints about debate moderators and some made-up stuff about crime. He criticizes statistics, though candidate Trump often references (made up or out-of-date) statistics to support his points.

That last linked article from the Washington Post notes that crime statistics have been in general decline since the 1990s, but did spike in 2020, Trump's final year of office (during the pandemic). Crime stats remained a bit high until 2022, but have declined substantially since then. 

 

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