Illegal Alien Crime Rates
In response to a question about an “illegal alien driver” who “mowed down” a police officer, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D–CT) said, “I’m not lying when I say that immigrants commit crimes at a rate lower than natural-born Americans.”
IN FACT, illegal aliens commit crimes at multiplicatively higher rates than people born in the USA, a reality that politicians, journalists, and academics have obscured by using these 10 ploys:
- Like Murphy, they mask the crime rates of illegal immigrants by lumping them together with legal immigrants who are naturally law-abiding because they must pass a criminal background check in order to immigrate. Even after the questioner said to Murphy, “Please make the distinction between legal and illegal,” Murphy replied, “I’m answering your question” and then failed to make the distinction.
- They use 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 misclassify numerous criminals with “other/unknown” immigration status as native-born citizens.
- They employ statistical strategies that manipulate the data and fail to provide a straightforward accounting of facts.
- 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.
- They conflate association with causation, a fallacy that high schoolers are taught to avoid.
- They cherry pick data, which an academic book describes as “one of the worst abuses of analytics.”
