Illegal Immigrants and Crime – Assessing the Evidence

Whether illegal immigrants bring a significant amount of crime to the United States is one of the most important questions to answer in the debate over immigration policy.   President Trump also seems to think so as he launched his campaign in 2015 with the nowinfamous quote: “[Mexican illegal immigrants] are bringing drugs.  They’re bringing crime.  They’re rapists.  And some, I assume, are good people.”  Fromexecutive orders tomajor talking points to the President ’s speeches, which Vox reporter Dara Lind has aptly described as “immigrants are coming over the border to kill you, ” Trump is interested in this important topic.  It is difficult to know whether illegal immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans are.  All immigrants have a lower criminal incarceration rate and there are lower crime rates in the neighborhoods where they live, according to the near-unanimous findings of the peer-reviewed evidence.   Since 1911, large nationwide federal immigration commissions have asked whether immigrants are more crime-prone than native-born Americans andeach one of them answered no, even when the rest of their reports unjustifiably blamed immigrants for virtually every problem in the United States.   From the 1911 Immigration Commission, also known as the Dillingham Commission, to the 1931 Wickersham Commission, and 1994’s Barbara Jordan Commission, each has reported that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than nativ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs