Yet Again, The Data Shows Migrants Are More Law-Abiding Than US Citizens

This has always been the truth. And it has always been ignored by people like Donald Trump, who combine “if it bleeds, it leads” media narratives with the always-exploitable fear of “others.”

Whether a migrant is in this country legally or illegally, the odds of them committing criminal acts are much lower than those for US citizens. And it makes sense. Any criminal act committed by a migrant — even one here legally — can provide grounds for deportation. US citizens, however, don’t need to worry about that. All they have to worry about is this Leader of the Free World’s ranking on the incarcerations-per-capita leader boards — one that puts a whole lot of autocratic nations to shame.

Sure, other nations might use homosexuality, being female, blasphemy, or simply adhering to the “wrong” religion as an excuse to lock up people en masse. Our kink happens to be drugs, which doesn’t make us any better than our rivals. In fact, it might make us worse because we’re not comfortable openly proclaiming we’re locking up minorities just because they’re minorities.

Anyway, back to the bullshit about immigrants being innately criminal. It’s never been true. And it’s still just as false, even if the anti-immigrant rhetoric has been amplified considerably during the Trump years. Ilya Somin directs us to the latest report on migrant crime rates compiled by the Cato Institute. What the report [PDF] says will come as no surprise to anyone — not even those who continue to deliberately ignore this evidence.

Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and that native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated….

Here’s more of the data, which the Cato Institute agrees is somewhat stymied by the fact that the government generally doesn’t do much to track the residency status of arrestees unless it serves their political purpose. For most of the last decade, though, pushing the “immigrants are criminals” narrative has been at the forefront of immigration discussions, so it makes sense there might be more of this specific data recently. Even so, the data contradicts the narrative.

An estimated 1,617,197 native-born Americans, 67,813 illegal immigrants, and 58,515 legal immigrants were incarcerated in 2023. The incarceration rate for native-born Americans was 1,221 per 100,000; 613 per 100,000 for illegal immigrants; and 319 per 100,000 for legal immigrants in 2022. […] If native-born Americans were incarcerated at the same rate as illegal immigrants, about 806,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated. Conversely, if natives were incarcerated at the same rate as legal immigrants, about 1.2 million fewer native-born Americans would be incarcerated.

Look at that! A solution to jail overcrowding. Just allow more immigration! And if you think crime rates are still too high, this will do the trick as well, as Somin notes in his post:

In sum, immigration – including the illegal kind – is actually reducing our crime rate, not raising it. 

Cato even has an answer for the racists who continue to believe the only reason US citizens commit more crimes than immigrants is because the US is home to a lot of Black people. Please read through this entire quote because the last sentence is worth the wait.

A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….

Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.

LOL. It’s truly a pleasure to watch bigots be informed that compounding their bigotry doesn’t suddenly make them right. It only makes them as wrong as they’ve always been, give or take a few percentage points.

Not that this matters to the bigots. They’ll continue to insist the facts aren’t the facts and their gut feelings about immigrants and non-white US citizens are what really matters. And they definitely love a government similarly compelled by ignorance but with the power to make their delusions a reality.

For the rest of us, this simply says what we’ve always known. Immigrants are a positive addition to this nation and have always been. That they’ve managed to survive wave after wave of hatred and government infliction of misery shows how much they’re willing to sacrifice just to give their offspring a better shot at living a meaningful life.

Those of us born in the US are just lucky to be here. We didn’t have to do anything and we’re still treated like we’ve done the most to secure what is now considered to be an exalted status. It’s not that the immigrants are trying to steal a nation from us. It’s that we’re too complacent to fully appreciate the freedoms we have. And under this administration, complacency is going to result in a nation that doesn’t provide hope for anyone, no matter where they’re from.