Immigrant Crime
The View’s Sunny Hostin claims that “immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes in this country than actual American-born citizens.”
IN FACT, only legal immigrants are much less likely to commit crimes, and that’s because they must pass a criminal background check in order to immigrate. Illegal immigrants avoid this vetting and are much more likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens. Yet, the media continually promotes studies that claim the opposite based on these fatal flaws:
- They use dishonest measures to calculate crime rates, like dividing the number of NON-CITIZENS in prison by the TOTAL number of ALL immigrants in the United States.
- They fail to account for the fact that most criminals are repeat offenders, and the U.S. deports masses of non-citizen criminal convicts per year, thus reducing the number who remain in the U.S.
- They fail to account for the fact that the vast bulk of illegal immigrants commit identity fraud and/or tax evasion but are rarely prosecuted for these crimes, even though they are federal felonies punishable by up to five years in prison.
- They cherry pick data, which an academic book about analyzing data describes as “one of the worst abuses of analytics.”
- They obscure their source data, a transparent breach of research ethics.
- They employ statistical strategies that manipulate the data and fail to provide a straightforward accounting of the facts.
- They use bait-and-switch tactics.
- They conflate association with causation, a fallacy that high schoolers are taught to avoid.
