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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