Posted on 09/29/2016 8:15:48 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Immigration only made a brief cameo in Monday night’s debate, but Donald Trump managed to once again falsely connect immigrants to crime.
In response to a question on race relations in America, Trump said:“We have gangs roaming the street. And in many cases, they’re illegally here, illegal immigrants. And they have guns. And they shoot people. And we have to be very strong. And we have to be very vigilant.”
No matter how researchers slice the data, though, the numbers show that immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans. But that’s not good enough for Trump’s followers. They firmly believe immigrants make America less safe. What the anti-immigration crowd needs to understand is that not only are immigrants less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, but they also protect us from crime in several ways.
To begin with, immigrants prevent crime indirectly by simply committing far fewer crimes per person than native-born Americans.
Here’s how it works: imagine 1 out of every 20 people is a criminal. If you are a criminal, you have a 5% chance of bumping into another criminal who tells you about an opportunity to commit a crime or helps you carry it out. When an influx of low-crime immigrants enters the country, they reduce the chances of you making that connection, thus reducing overall crime.
This is one reason why homicides and robberies in the most immigrant-dense cities fell further than elsewhere in the country following a surge in immigration in recent years. It is no surprise that America’s crime rates plunged as immigration surged in the 1990s.
Immigrants also reduce crime rates by infusing new capital into rundown areas. Studies have shown that filling abandoned buildings and fixing up neighborhoods makes residents less likely to commit crimes, and new residents also fill public coffers, which can be invested in better law enforcement.
Buffalo is a good example. Denise Beehag of the International Institute of Buffalo told NPR last year that immigrants “were pretty much the only group that was moving into the West side of Buffalo and taking over those vacant houses and businesses.” Crime fell most dramatically in Buffalo in Bangladeshi immigrant areasby 70%.
Immigrants also reduce crime in more direct ways. For starters, about 25,000 police officers, detectives and other law enforcement personnel were born in another country, according to the Census Bureau in 2014.USA Today reported last year that more law enforcement agencies across the country are recruiting immigrants to fill vacancies in tough areas and connect with the diverse population.
Immigrant police officers expand the size of the law enforcement labor force, which lowers crime in two ways. First, the sheer number of cops has been shown to have a depressing effect on crime. And second, allowing agencies the ability to hire the best recruit possible increases the quality of their workforce, which further depresses crime.
Of course, immigrants who aren’t cops also stop crimes and save lives. There are another nearly 6,000 immigrants working as firefighters, roughly 14,000 as correctional or probation officers, almost 70,000 working in private security, and nearly 700,000 in medical and health services, including nearly half of all diagnosticians and treating practitioners.
Immigrants are saving lives without much publicity in all of these fields. But even outside of them, news stories abound of immigrants preventing or stopping crime.
Consider two recent cases: Peter Lars Jonsson and Carl-Fredrik Arndt, Swedish students at Stanford University, were cycling home in Spring 2016 when they stopped a sexual assault and apprehended the perpetrator. They provided the key testimony against him at trial. In 2015, Feidin Santana, a Dominican immigrant living in South Carolina, caught a police officer killing a black man named Walter Scott on camera, helping lead to the indictment of the murderer.
It’s not just legal immigrants either. In 2011, Diaz Chacon, a Mexican immigrant without legal documents, stopped an abduction of a 6-year-old girl. Chacon jumped into his pickup and chased the kidnapper until the driver crashed, before pulling the child from the van and returning her to safety. Another unauthorized immigrant acting as a night watchman at a convenience store fended off and shot a burglar in 2008 in Texas.
Moreover, situations in which immigrants provide key testimony against criminals is not at all rare. In fact, there were 76,000 U visas issued from 2008 to 2016 to foreign witnesses to crimes cooperating with law enforcement. Another 120,000 had applied and had applications delayed due to congressional caps on visas.
Donald Trump is not wrong to say that some immigrants can cause crime. But they help make the country safer and more livable.
1. They don’t address ILLEGAL immigrants, who already ARE criminals for being here at all; 2. Incarceration rates don’t show the true picture because so many are caught and released, or deported, or jump back across the border, and never convicted; 3. WTF is CATO, of all places, attacking Trump for? How could THEY possibly want Hillary? Is EVERYONE sold out?!
'At a Cabinet meeting today, Attorney General William P. Barr said nearly one-third of the first 6,000 riot suspects arrested and processed through the court system were illegal aliens, according to a senior administration offical. Barr has not proposed any special effort to have them deported, a Justice Department spokesman said.'
So Cato cherry-picks Buffalo and two students as “proof” applied nationally to an issue which it has a vested interest?
Got it
I guess possibly the majority 47 states, but somehow doubt the people in border states like Texas, Arizona and California would agree with the author, even if the people do.... the crime statistics dont.
Great analogy
This is so frikkin’ stupid!
If they weren’t here then we would never have to even worry about them committing any crimes in the first place. Then there would definitely be less crime.
They’ve already committed enough crime when they illegally stepped foot on American soil.
I presume Cato is more partial to Gary Johnson.
Illegal immigrants are all committing crimes, without exceptions.
They are illegally in another country.
Also, every crime committed by an illegal is a crime that would not have been committed by an illegal.
It’s simple logic. Also, Donald Trump did not say this about “immigrants,” but of illegals.
Get your head out, Cato.
What part of ILLEGAL do they not understand?
The mere act of being here illegally is a crime.
Aren’t ILLEGAL immigrants committing a crime by default? They’re here ILLEGALLY ... These morons are the ones lying when they use the blanket victim group “immigrants” when we mean “ILLEGAL” immigrants.
100% of illegals commit at least one crime. We have allowed the Left to control the dialogue too long, separating or conflating illegals and legals to suit the point they wish to make.
To clarify:
“Also, every crime committed by an illegal is a crime that would not have been committed by an illegal if that person was not here.”
Somehow this nitwit is equating someone like a friend of mine, a legal immigrant and civil engineer, with a MS-13 tattooed gang who sneaks across the border.
They are, in his eyes, part of EXACTLY the same pool.
So since she is quite law abiding that means he will be as well.
This is, of course, nonsense.
Rosanna Rosanna Dana but without the nevermind...illegal immigrants are criminals 100% of the time. Legal immigrants had nothing to do with what he said.
Now when you are talking illegal aliens and what are quaintly termed "refugees" you are undoubtedly right.
ILLEGAL ALIENS kill and main thousands of CITIZENS and LEGAL IMMIGRANTS every g-d damned YEAR!
AND it is all PREVENTABLE!
Of course we can't use the "If we can save just one life" argument that libs use all the TIME to try to take our guns....
95% of the outstanding murder warrants in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens. 95% !!!!!!
David Bier has been drinking too much beer.
David Bier’s an idiot... First we’re talking about illegals... NOT immigrants.
Second, ANY crime they commit is one more than would have been committed if they had stayed in their home country.
The left is always so cute with their straw man arguments against Trump. Trump never at any time claimed that immigrants commit more crimes. We have far too many propagandists out there, even (especially?) ones posing as intellectuals.
The relevant point about illegal immigration is that zero of the many crimes illegals have committed in this country would have happened had the laws only been enforced. Over 25,000 illegals have been convicted of homicide in this country. Those people would not have died, except for the policies of the left and the open-borders Republicans. They have a lot of blood on their hands.
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