The Fatal Flaw in John R. Lott Jr. ’s Study on Illegal Immigrant Crime in Arizona

Economist John R. Lott Jr. of theCrime Prevention Research Center released aworking paper in which he purports to find that illegal immigrants in Arizona from 1985 through 2017 have a far higher prison admissions rate than U.S. citizens. Media fromFox News to theWashington Times and theArizona Republic have reported on Lott ’s claims while Attorney GeneralJeff Sessions and RepresentativePaul Gosar (R-AZ) have echoed them from their positions of authority. However, Lott made a small but fatal error that undermines his finding.  Lott wrote his paper based on a dataset he obtained from the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) that lists all admitted prisoners in the state of Arizona from 1985 to 2017. According to Lott, the data allowed him to identify “whether they [the prisoners] are illegal or legal residents.” This is where Lott made his small error: The dataset doesnotallow him or anybody else to identify illegal immigrants.[i]  The variable that Lott focused on is “CITIZEN.” That variable is broken down into seven categories. Lott erroneously assumed that the third category, called “non-US citizen and deportable,” only counted illegal immigrants. That is not true, non-US citizen and deportable immigrants are not all illegal immigrants. A significant p roportion of non-U.S. citizens who are deported every year are legal immigrants who violate the terms of their visas in one way or the other, frequently by committing crimes. According to the American Immig...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs