Statements like "immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born" are frequently repeated with a level of confidense usually associated with laws of physics.
So is it true and how do we know?
Well... neither the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting System (UCR) nor its replacement the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) tr…
Statements like "immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born" are frequently repeated with a level of confidense usually associated with laws of physics.
So is it true and how do we know?
Well... neither the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting System (UCR) nor its replacement the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) tracks whether the offender is a citizen, a legal immigrant or an illegal immitrant. So there is no hard data.
Rather, the notion is based on a single poorly designed and implemented study by the Texas Prison system. So how did Texas determine whether a prisoner is an illegal immigrant or not? Simple, they ran their fingerprints against the database of migrant encounters held by the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
So if a migrant was not fingerprinted by DHS, they were considered a U.S. citizen, thereby overcounting residents and undercounting illegal migrants.
The whole notion defies simple reason and basic criminlogy. The demographics of illegal immigrants shifts toward males in their late teen through early middle age, a cohort that by the virtue of both gender and age is over-represented in criminal behavior.
Then there is the failure to report crime among migrant groups....
To know the rate of criminality you would need to know how many undocumented immigrants there were in the United States which by definition is a difficult number to obtain.
Likewise, it woud be difficult to claim that they are more likely to commit crimes.
There might be other factors that could theoretically affect policy. Is there a difference between those who overstay their visa vs sneak in across the border, those from Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, etc..? By definition these statistics all seem like they would be difficult to pin down.
Statements like "immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born" are frequently repeated with a level of confidense usually associated with laws of physics.
So is it true and how do we know?
Well... neither the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting System (UCR) nor its replacement the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) tracks whether the offender is a citizen, a legal immigrant or an illegal immitrant. So there is no hard data.
Rather, the notion is based on a single poorly designed and implemented study by the Texas Prison system. So how did Texas determine whether a prisoner is an illegal immigrant or not? Simple, they ran their fingerprints against the database of migrant encounters held by the federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
So if a migrant was not fingerprinted by DHS, they were considered a U.S. citizen, thereby overcounting residents and undercounting illegal migrants.
The whole notion defies simple reason and basic criminlogy. The demographics of illegal immigrants shifts toward males in their late teen through early middle age, a cohort that by the virtue of both gender and age is over-represented in criminal behavior.
Then there is the failure to report crime among migrant groups....
To know the rate of criminality you would need to know how many undocumented immigrants there were in the United States which by definition is a difficult number to obtain.
Likewise, it woud be difficult to claim that they are more likely to commit crimes.
There might be other factors that could theoretically affect policy. Is there a difference between those who overstay their visa vs sneak in across the border, those from Venezuela, Mexico, Haiti, etc..? By definition these statistics all seem like they would be difficult to pin down.
So true. And of course, if those "US-born" are blacks... well then, the left must search for alternative explanations other than the obvious.