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Crimes by Illegal Immigrants

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The View’s Sunny Hostin claims that “undocumented immigrants” are “5 times less likely to commit crimes than Americans.”

In fact, LEGAL immigrants are 5 times less likely to commit crimes than Americans, precisely because they must pass a rigorous background check in order to immigrate. Conversely, ILLEGAL immigrants commit crimes at several times the rate of Americans.

Frequent claims to the contrary are rooted in studies that suffer from these 10 fatal flaws:

  1. They lump together non-citizens who are lawfully present in the U.S. with those who are not, enabling the low crime rates of legal immigrants to mask the high crime rates of illegals.
  2. They use blatantly deceptive 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.
  3. They fail to account for the fact that most convicted criminals are repeat offenders, and the U.S. expels more than 100,000 non-citizens convicted of committing crimes in the U.S. every year, the equivalent of the nation’s entire prison population of non-citizen convicts.
  4. They fail to account for the fact that illegally crossing the border is a federal crime punishable by up to 6 months in prison, but this crime is rarely prosecuted because there are millions of illegal border crossers, and it is much quicker and easier to expel them for the civil offense of being illegally present than to prosecute them for the crime of illegally crossing the border.
  5. 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.
  6. They obscure their source data, a transparent breach of research ethics.
  7. They employ statistical strategies that manipulate the data and fail to provide a straightforward accounting of the facts.
  8. They use bait-and-switch tactics where they don’t compare the crime rates of illegal immigrants to all Americans but to subsets of Americans who have high crime rates.
  9. They conflate association with causation, a fallacy that high schoolers are taught to avoid.
  10. They cherry pick data, which an academic book describes as “one of the worst abuses of analytics.”

Providing a very rough scale for the crimes committed by illegal immigrants, the U.S. Government Accountability Office published a study in 2018 of non-citizens in U.S. prisons and jails during 2010–2016. The study found that these inmates had been arrested/transferred for the following crimes committed within the U.S. during 1964–2017:

  • 505,400 assaults.
  • 219,900 burglaries.
  • 169,200 weapons violations.
  • 133,800 sex offenses.
  • 33,300 homicides.
  • 24,200 kidnappings.
  • 1,500 acts of terrorism.
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