MY REPLY:
“In his newsletter, jasher.substack.com/p/on-crime-immigrat…, Asher came up with the next best alternative. He looked at trends for ‘violent crime across the 14 counties along the Texas border with Mexico.’ If there is, in fact, a violent crime wave fueled by migrants, it would show up in these counties before anywhere else.”
This graph only shows the RATE of crime. “In thinking about illegal immigrant criminality, it is important to distinguish the number of crimes from the rate of crime. There is no question that illegal immigrants have committed a large number of crimes in border states such as Texas. The state’s Department of Public Safety (DPS) that hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants have been arrested in Texas on all manner of charges, including 986 homicide charges dating back to 2011.”
cis.org/Oped/Border-Crisis-and-Violent-…
If crime rates remain stable but 10,000 extra people are killed by people who have no legal right to be in the country in the first place is that a problem? I suspect that depends on your ideological orientation.
Nevertheless, studies do seem to indicate that immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native populations. However, we know that Southern countries have released violent offenders, hoping they would leave to the US, and we know that a disproportionate number of the recent migrants are young men (a population with a much higher rate of crime than otherwise). In other words, we shouldn’t be looking at immigrants as a single group, but rather at RECENT immigrants.
“If there is, in fact, a violent crime wave fueled by migrants, it would show up in these counties before anywhere else.”
OR, perhaps career criminals and repeat violent offenders are mainly concerned with moving on toward their destination before they offend.
OR, maybe those counties already had a huge saturation of illegal immigrants and so migrants aren’t staying and committing crimes
OR, maybe the high level of illegal immigrants already in these areas are leading to a noise/signal issue
OR, maybe the policing resources have been strained for years and the data only reflects shortcomings in investigation and reporting
OR, maybe those jurisdictions’ law enforcement efforts are serving as an effective deterrent against criminality, whereas the more lax enforcement and sentencing policies of more Northern cities have encouraged it.
OR…
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I think you’re going to need better data to refute a claim with such a solid anecdotal and intuitive basis. This simply isn’t sufficient to claim that the idea that immigration is leading to increases crime is a ‘deception’. OF COURSE immigration leads to increased crime. The only question is how much and what kind… and what should be done about it.
:
“Ideology seldom makes cruel people kind, but it often makes kind people cruel.”
:
Despite the obvious fact that mass migration is bad, our rulers cling to migrationism like grim death. Given a choice between disincentivising asylees and intimidating, browbeating and harassing the millions of anti-migrationists among their own citizens, our governments generally choose the latter path, even though it is obviously the worse of the two.
Additionally unsettling, is the fact that official justifications for mass migration often have a creepy, post-hoc flavour about them. They sound much more like excuses dreamed up after the borders had already been opened, rather than any kind of reason mass migration must occur. When the migrationists really started to go crazy in 2015, for example, we were told that border security was simply impossible in the modern world and that infinity migrants were a force of nature we would have to deal with. That didn’t sound right even at the time, and since the pandemic border closures we no longer hear the inevitability narrative very much, although – and this is very bizarre to type – there is some evidence that high political figures like Angela Merkel believed it at the time. It is well worth thinking about why that might have been the case.