I personally never believed this narrative as it is quite common in political issues to skew and or spin data to support one’s desired position. This argument is often used by the left to support their desire for unfettered and unlimited immigration (AKA Open Borders) into the country. It is also nonsensical to believe that flooding any country with people from crime infested, poverty-stricken ■■■■■■■■ countries will magically make the receiving country better off. I’ve also have found in my two decades of following politics numerous counter arguments to this narrative, and here is another one:
These claims usually conflate legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants tend to follow the law, but illegal immigrants are a different story.
As to the claim that crime is falling despite a flood of illegals, it depends on whether one looks at just crimes reported to police (the FBI data) or total crime as measured by the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Total crime rose markedly in 2021, 2022, and 2023 (the last year it was available). This surge coincided with a massive flood of illegals. The increases shown for total crime during the Biden-Harris administration are by far the largest percentage increases over any other three-year period, more than doubling the previous record.
One big problem is that the government databases are a mess in identifying illegal aliens. You can see this in terms of errors in the NICS background checks that are supposed to stop non-citizens with criminal records from buying guns.
A prior Maricopa County Attorney’s Office study revealed that illegal immigrants committed 21.8% of felonies sentenced in Maricopa County Superior Court, over twice their proportion of Arizona’s population. Mexican nationals alone accounted for 13% of inmates in the state prison system.
Earlier work that the Crime Prevention Research Center did for the Arizona County Prosecutor’s Association also found that illegals made up a disproportionate share of the Arizona prison population and that legal immigrants were more law-abiding than the general population. Illegal immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, are more likely to be classified as dangerous, and are 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens.
Critics like the Washington Post cite academic studies asserting illegal immigrants are relatively law-abiding. There are numerous problems with these studies. None of them account for changes in police, arrest, or conviction rates, or imprisonment in explaining crime rates. They look at states like California but ignore the impact on cutting crime rates from laws such as California’s 1994 three-strikes law during the period studied.
They ignore a key issue: Criminals often target those similar to themselves. Illegal immigrants, therefore, are more likely to commit crimes against other illegal immigrants. These crimes often go unreported – for fear of deportation – and as the local population of illegal immigrants grows, underreporting almost certainly increases.
