Thread: Crimes by illegal aliens, not legal immigrants, are the real problem

Crimes by illegal aliens, not legal immigrants, are the real problem



A story published by The Hill last month about two studies claiming that “immigrants commit less crime than U.S. born citizens” misses the point that President Trump and other Americans are concerned over the crimes committed by illegal aliens, not legal immigrants. And the existing records on those crimes, like the murder of Kate Steinle in San Francisco in 2015, are truly shocking.

Ronald Mortensen points out some of the methodological problems with these studies in his recent piece in The Hill. But the problems are even worse. The Cato study concluded that “legal and illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives” and the Sentencing Project concluded in their report that “foreign-born residents of the United States commit crime less often than native-born citizens.”

But the issue isn’t non-citizens who are in this country legally, and who must abide by the law to avoid having their visas revoked or their application for citizenship refused. The real issue is the crimes committed by illegal aliens. And in that context, the claim is quite misleading, because both of these studies combine the crime rates of both citizens and non-citizens, legal and illegal.

Instead of using official crime data, these reports also use surveys. The Sentencing Project measures “crime and related behavior based on self-reported accounts of behavior” and Cato uses the United States Census American Community Survey (ACS). For obvious reasons, there is little incentive for anyone, let alone criminal aliens, to self-report their crimes. Many respondents will likely also fail to disclose that they are not a citizen out of fear of discovery and deportation.

These studies overlook disturbing actual data on crimes committed by criminal aliens. For example, the Government Accountability Office released two unsettling reports in 2005 on criminal aliens who are in prison for committing crimes in the United States, and issued an updated report in 2011.

The first report found that criminal aliens, both legal and illegal, make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners. Yet non-citizens are only about nine percent of the nation’s adult population. Thus, judging by the numbers in federal prisons alone, non-citizens commit federal crimes at three times the rate of citizens.

The findings in the second report are even more disturbing. It reviewed the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens in federal or state prisons and local jails who “entered the country illegally.” Those illegal aliens were arrested 459,614 times, an average of 8.3 arrests per illegal alien, and committed almost 700,000 criminal offenses, an average of roughly 12.7 offenses per illegal alien.

The 2011 GAO report is more of the same. The criminal histories of 251,000 criminal aliens showed that they had committed close to three million criminal offenses. Sixty-eight percent of those in federal prison and 66 percent of those in state prisons were from Mexico. Their offenses ranged from homicide and kidnapping to drugs, rape, burglary, and larceny.

Once again, these statistics are not fully representative of crimes committed by illegal aliens — this report only reflects the criminal histories of aliens who were in prison. If there were a way to include all crimes committed by criminal aliens, the numbers would likely be higher since prosecutors often drop criminal charges against an illegal alien if immigration authorities will deport the alien.

The GAO reports also highlight another flaw in using survey data from a national sample. A key factor highlighted in the GAO reports is that criminal aliens from Mexico disproportionately make up incarcerations and that most arrests are made in the three border states of California, Texas, and Arizona.

In sum, it has not been proven that illegal aliens commit crimes at a lesser rate than either native-born or naturalized American citizens. In fact, existing data may support the opposite conclusion.

But even if it were true, it would be irrelevant to the point being made by President Trump — that none of the millions of crimes committed by illegal aliens would occur if they were not in the country in the first place or were deported when they were caught instead of being turned loose to repeatedly prey on other victims. That is a simple truth that too many American families know from personal experience.

Hans von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at the Heritage Foundation. He is the coauthor, along with John Fund, of Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk and Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.

http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blo...s-are-the-real

Reports find that immigrants commit less crime than US-born citizens

03/19/17 08:00 AM EDT



Immigrants commit crimes and are incarcerated at a much lower rate than U.S. citizens, according to two separate studies released this week.

A study by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice research and advocacy group, found that "foreign-born residents of the United States commit crime less often than native-born citizens."

Another study, by the libertarian Cato Institute, compares incarceration rates by migratory status, ethnicity and gender.

"All immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives relative to their shares of the population," the Cato study reads.

On the campaign trail and as president, Donald Trump has portrayed illegal immigration as a dual risk: an economic threat and a source of increased crime. Under President Trump's 2018 budget request, the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) budget would grow by $3 billion to fund his proposed border wall and executive orders on immigration.

When he launched his presidential bid, Trump said that illegal immigrants “are bringing crime.” And in speeches, he frequently mentions individuals whose loved ones have been killed by illegal immigrants.
"It's all enforcement-only, following the rhetoric of Trump that he used in the campaign and continues to use, making immigrants at fault for everything, from crime to the economy," said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.).

But the two studies don’t point to immigrants posing more of a threat of crime than citizens born in the U.S.

Among people aged 18-54, 1.53 percent of natives are incarcerated, as are 0.85 percent of undocumented immigrants and 0.47 percent of documented immigrants, according to the Cato study of comparative incarceration rates.

The Cato study found that there are about 2 million U.S-born citizens, 123,000 undocumented immigrants and 64,000 documented foreign citizens in U.S. jails.

If natural-born citizens were incarcerated at the same rate as undocumented immigrants, "about 893,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated," read the study. Similarly, if native citizens were incarcerated at the same rate as documented immigrants, 1.4 million fewer would be in prison.

The Sentencing Project study even goes so far as to suggest that increased immigration "may have contributed to the historic drop in crime rates" since 1990.

While the study is "not definitive in proving causation," it links crime trends — 730 violent crimes per 100,000 citizens in 1990 compared to 362 per 100,000 in 2014 — and immigration trends in the same period. According to the study, there were 3.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country in 1990, and 11.1 million in 2014.

Democrats say it's a well-known fact that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, but they say Trump is using fear of immigrants for political gain among his voter base.

"There's always the horrible, fallacious view that you have to go after immigrants and then you point out a few immigrants that have committed horrible crimes," said Rep. Juan Vargas (D-Calif.).

"You could do the same with mothers. I remember quite well a mother taking her children and driving them into a lake, and they all drowned. You wouldn't make the argument then that mothers are bad and we have to go after mothers because mothers are criminal," he added.

Grijalva said the tactic would ultimately backfire on Republicans.

"The weakest of people in this country are the ones being made the scapegoats for everything, and unfortunately, facts don't matter, logic doesn't matter," said Grijalva.

"It's a rush to deal with a campaign issue that I think Republicans in general and the Trump administration specifically feel that an anti-immigrant strategy is going to be something that will serve them well in the next round of elections. I don't think so, I think it's going to catch up with them," he said.

But for Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), the issue isn't whether the Trump administration enforces existing laws based on statistical information, but whether those laws are adequate. He criticized both Trump and former President Obama for their immigration priorities.

"This president is emphasizing border security — the last president deported more people than anybody in history. Both of those approaches, I think, don't deal with a big part of what is broken, which is a legal system that is just dysfunctional," Diaz-Balart said.

Diaz-Balart added that the border is "porous" and that Trump is fulfilling his campaign promises by focusing on border security.

But Democrats have a sense of urgency in reversing Trump's initial actions on immigration, both because they believe that immigrants are less prone to crime, and because they disagree with Trump's budget proposal.

"I live in San Diego. A high number of immigrants live there, both documented and undocumented, and that's one of the reasons why it's such a safe area. The crime rate among immigrants is much lower than it is among the general population. So spending all this money to go after immigrants, a safer population, really makes no sense at all," said Vargas.

http://thehill.com/latino/324607-rep...-born-citizens

This is the tale of two stories, huh? Well, when the "studies" conflict each other, it's time to just look around and trust your own eyes. Count the number of dead Americans killed by illegal aliens. Count the number of Americans jailed for pot while the illegal aliens running illegal drugs roam free and buy up our politicians.

Common Sense, people. It's why God gave it to us and why Jesus said, "beware the scribes", so use it. Good law-abiding honorable people don't invade other nations in violation of their border and immigration laws. Poor peasants "looking for a better life" don't have $12,000 a head to pay coyotes to sneak them into the United States. These are all criminals.