Mexico is Not Sending Its Murderers: Homicide Rates on the Mexican Border

President Trumptweeted this morning that, “One of the reasons we need Great Border Security is that Mexico’s murder rate in 2017 increased by 27% to 31,174 people killed, a record! The Democrats want Open Borders. I want Maximum Border Security and respect for ICE and our great Law Enforcement Professionals!”  He tweeted this because he’s spent the last few daysstating that he would shut down the government if Congress did not adopt his immigration proposed reforms in the upcoming budget debate, especially the funding for the construction of a border wall.Besides the political motivation for his tweet, President Trump seems to have assumed that crime in Mexico bleeds north into the United States, so more border security is required to prevent that from happening as murder rates begin to rise again in Mexico.   Althoughillegal immigrant incarceration rates are lower than they are for natives,illegal immigrant conviction rates in the border state of Texas are lower for almost every crime including homicide, and thevast majority of evidence indicates that illegal and legal immigrants are less crime-prone than natives, the President ’s specific claim that murder rates spread from Mexico to the United States is different from most of the existing peer-reviewed literature. My colleague Andrew Forrester and I ran some simple regressions to test whether higher homicide rates in Mexican states that border the United States spread northward to U.S. states on the other side...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs