No, immigrants don’t commit more crimes

A new explainer from the Migration Policy Institute aims to apply facts to the lively discussion about immigration and crime. An MPI spokesman said the non-partisan research organisation, known for a sober tone, hoped to clear up the “confusion”.

That’s one way to characterize Donald Trump’s nine-year campaign of lies. Trump is busy making the final pitch of his campaign to American voters. It is a familiar pitch with a leading role for immigrants. Vice President Kamala Harris, in Trump’s telling, is opening the border to “millions” of brown people “from the jails, from the jails” so they can kill you and your family and then, after everyone is dead, steal your job and vote for democrats. . Because of all the migrant killers, a once great nation is now “occupied America,” Trump said.

In fact, migrants are so vicious that you can’t even call them human. “Democrats say please don’t call them animals, they’re human. I said no, they’re not human. They’re not human,” Trump said. “They are animals.”

One might wonder why a former prosecutor aspiring to win votes for high office would be so eager to flood the nation with killers. After all, it seems politically inopportune. But any such question imposes a heavier burden than Trump’s demagoguery can bear. Why did the Salem witches cast spells? Witches, immigrants: their evil ways are beyond the imagination of simple, honest people. “We love the undereducated,” Trump said in 2016.

America’s violent crime rate has dropped since its COVID peak in 2020, when Trump was president. Crime perpetrated by immigrants, however, has been low for a long time. Incarceration rates for immigrants have been lower than for Native Americans since at least 1870, when the data was first recorded. In 2020, immigrants were 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, according to the MPI report.

It turns out that immigrants are incarcerated at lower rates than native-born Americans because they are less likely to do what Trump himself has done: commit crimes. “A growing body of research shows that immigrants not only commit fewer crimes, but also do not increase crime rates in the American communities where they settle,” the MPI report states. “In fact, some studies indicate that immigration can reduce criminal activity, especially violent crime, in places with inclusive policies and social environments where immigrant populations are well established.”

A social environment where immigrant populations are well established is New York City. The city is home to about 3 million immigrants, including an undocumented population estimated at 500,000 or more. However, as my colleague Justin Fox has written , police statistics show that New York City had the fifth-lowest homicide rate among the nation’s 50 largest cities in 2023. Queens County in New York City, one of the most ethnically diverse enclaves in the world, where almost half the population is foreign-born, is the fourth safest county in the US. A correlation between immigrants and safety is not unique to New York. More than a quarter of the residents of Boston, which the Economist magazine praised as America’s safest big city, are foreign-born.

Of course, since immigrants are humans and not animals, some commit crimes. In the rare cases where an immigrant kills a young woman, Trump’s demagoguery takes on an almost religious tenor, especially if the young woman was, according to Trump, “beautiful.”

Despite these forays into fact-based demagoguery, however, most of Trump’s lies are, and always were, lies. A 2020 federal study of Texas found that immigrants in all legal states were arrested at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens for violent and drug crimes and were arrested at one-quarter the rate of rate of US-born citizens for property crimes. “Unauthorized immigrants in Texas had by far the lowest offense rates compared to immigrants born and legally present in the United States,” the MPI report states.

Of course, Trump’s lies wouldn’t help him if there wasn’t a ready market for them. Republicans are enthusiastic consumers. In a 2023 Gallup poll, only 22% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents agreed that New York City, home of Fox News, would be “safe to live in or visit.” Encouraged by a wide range of Republican leaders, including Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson, many Republicans also believe that large numbers of undocumented immigrants are committing crimes by voting illegally in elections.

Perhaps Johnson is unaware of the state audits that discredit claims of illegal immigrant voting. Curiously, however, Johnson, with the entire House at his command, did not infiltrate any House committee to get to the bottom of these allegations. Nor did he hire investigators to gather evidence, or demand that GOP legislatures launch investigations in their states. He didn’t hire top Republican election lawyers, many of whom work within walking distance of the U.S. Capitol, to file claims and focus the legal system on the alleged problem.

Republicans spend billions of dollars on elections, but won’t hire experts to investigate the alleged cause of their losses. Strange, isn’t it? Maybe Johnson and his colleagues are all fools. Or just home liars like Trump.

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