http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NWVjN2Q1NDhkYmM3NzA3MTUwNTQyMjIwNjAyM2U4NDQ=
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Crime & Immigration [Mark Krikorian]
The DC Examiner opines today on what it calls "competing studies" on immigrant crime. The hawkish Family Security Matters site recently released an analysis finding that illegal aliens annually kill more Americans than the Iraq War. Meanwhile, the research wing of the open-borders American Immigration Lawyers Association (headed by "Jihad Jeannie" Butterfield, former head of a political arm of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine — see here and here) has released a report finding that immigrants are less likely to be in prison than the native-born.
Despite problems with the data (the second study is based on census data that even people in the Census Bureau acknowledge is worthless and unusable), these aren't really competing studies at all, since both tell us things that we've long known: immigrants as a group have a lower crime rate than the native-born (other than the multiple federal crimes committed by illegal aliens), but even at a lower crime rate, if you let in millions of immigrants, they're going to commit thousands of crimes.
For policymakers, the real story is the one the immigration lawyers study downplays: There is a massive increase in criminality from the first to the second generation. The study may exaggerate the shift due to its amateurish mistakes, but it found that native-born Hispanic male high-school dropouts are 11 times more likely to be incarcerated than their foreign-born counterparts. This suggests that as the sons of the current immigration wave (which is mostly Hispanic — a lack of diversity unprecedented in American history) reach the peak ages for criminality, we may well see a reversal of the past decade's decline in crime.
