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 areas—by 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.
Since this author is an idiot setting up straw men arguments I quit reading
Illegals don’t have to create the most crime.
Just some crime to be an argument against them.
By definition the first decision an illegal immigrant makes upon entering the country is to break our immigration laws. So sick of our “betters” acting as if breaking our immigration laws is not a crime.
BS. The nightly crime report in any Southern California city/town is almost exclusively immigrants (illegal)
what a strawman!
it’s not who commits the most crime - it’s not a contest
The point is, hispanics, male and female, comprise the second highest population in our prisons and they’re not there for shoplifting:
“According to a 2009 report by the Pew Hispanic Center, in 2007 Latinos “accounted for 40% of all sentenced federal offenders-more than triple their share (13%) of the total U.S. adult population”. This was an increase from 24% in 1991. 72% of the Latino offenders were not U.S. citizens.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_States#Hispanics
more:
2010 Incarceration rates per 100,000, males: blacks 4347, hispanics 1,775, whites 678
females: blacks 260, hispanics 133, whites 91
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_States#Ethnicity
Sheesh what a stupid author
I’ve been getting a lot of unsolicited phone calls and junk mail. It’s been taking up a lot of my time. Anyone know where I can get one of those monkeys that answers your phone for you, can be trained to star 60? And open letters, file bills and toss junk? A monkey or a libertarian.
There’s that one little piece that just screws up the whole statistic. So they just leave it out.
Wow. Sad. I used to respect Cato. This author, well, if he went to college he should try to get his money back.
Ok, as a percentage of the population what is immigrant crime levels?
I know blacks males between 14-34 make over half of all crime according to Obama’s Justice Department, but what are the other numbers?
CATO Institute wackjob proving that they are the loony libertarians of US politics.
Just read the Wash. Post crime reports daily and you will see that a tremendous amount of crime in the DC/Md and No. Va areas are committed by Hispanics, legal and illegal.
And the idea that just by being here immigrants lower the crime statistics is as stupid a conclusion as I have seen in many decades.
Being here illegal is a crime so the statistics on that issue alone are staggering - in the millions.
Latin American drug cartels are usually made up of illegal immigrants and foreign nationals, not too many native born Americans. So you have a whole section of the drug-trafficking crime industry made up of illegals and foreigners. That is a subset of crime statistics that is staggering as compared to drug cartels from the Amish, Jews, Scandinavians, and Irish Americans (Literally known that I know of).
some people have way too much time on their hands and nothing in their heads.
I’ve seen a lot of hand waving arguments, but this double combination bank shot into a corner pocket takes the cake.
The rate does not matter. Every crime committed by an illegal immigrant is a crime that would not have occurred if the illegal immigrant was not here.
Now you can make the argument that the creation of a permanent shadow underclass of marginalized sub-minimum wage workers who do not have the protection of the law is a good thing. You can make the argument that the existence of a large pool of quasi-slave second-class citizens benefits society, and that this benefit outweighs the excess crime. But if you did, you would be a dumb-ass libertarian who has lost touch with reality.
Proves the irrelevance and dishonesty of the Cato Institute. Trump has repeatedly said ILLEGALS. Libertarians want their open borders.
Trump: “All catchers wear catcher’s mitts”
CATO: “Cricket players catch the ball bare-handed”
Did he say “more” crime? Or did he just point to instances of heinous murder and other crimes?
Shove it Cato.
Actually, they ALL commit crimes - every one of them, without any exceptions at all.
They’re here ILLEGALLY, which is, in itself, a crime - something which no one seems quite willing to acknowledge.
“Undocumented Immigrants” have a 100% crime rate.
Why allow black market skittles containing only a few poisonous ones per bag into the country at all?
Yeah, right. Wink, wink.
http://www.cato.org/people/david-bier
David J. Bier is an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity. He is an expert on visa reform, border security, and interior enforcement, and his work has been cited in the Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, and many other print and online publications.
From 2013 to 2015, Mr. Bier drafted immigration legislation as senior policy advisor for Congressman Raúl Labrador, a member of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security. Previously, he worked as the immigration policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and most recently as the director of immigration policy at the Niskanen Center.
Mr. Bier has a B.A. in political science from Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
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