If some illegal / undocumented foreigner sexually assaults a white person, that's all you'll see in the newspapers and media for a week. There will be townhall meetings, debates, protests.
While all this happens, twice as many will experience the same SA by their spouse, family member/friend, tinder date, or whatever. Likely you'll never hear about those - as if they never happened.
In the end, public perception is what drives everything. Far-right media has known this for a long time - and are using it for all it is worth. They also know that no one ever won the public by defending criminals.
Figure 2 shows that sexual assault is almost twice as likely to be perpetrated by immigrants than US-born citizens[0]. As a foreigner with no ball in the game here, I've seen a lot of outrage from both black-on-white and white-on-black violence in the US. Maybe some news papers like fox news are more selective in what they show, but APNews (which I've been reading for world news) seems to cover a pretty balanced range of racial crime.
> If some illegal / undocumented foreigner sexually assaults a white person, that's all you'll see in the newspapers and media for a week. There will be townhall meetings, debates, protests.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the scale of this, but surely it doesn't compare to the response that George Floyd got?
[0] - https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117#fig02
US-born citizen: 18.2
Legal immigrant: 31.2
Undocumented immigrant: 11.3
So while this is very US (Texas) specific study, and doesn't seem to provide more granular data. At least where I'm from (Norway), studies have shown that people born to immigrant parents tend to be most at risk, and be assaulted by other people born to immigrant parents. So basically immigrant-on-immigrant violence. Not sure if that at all translates to Texas. The studies usually don't try to explain why these things happen, but could be the result of things like socioeconomic factors.
Not to mention all the dark numbers - how many illegal immigrants that experience assault will report that to law enforcement? Compared to legal citizens.
People born of immigrant parents aren't immigrants!
(* terms and conditions apply)
Chilling thought, given the outright lying coming from the Executive.
Like, in my home country I may break speed limit and it will cost me a few hundred dollars in equivalent. After emigrating I'm paranoid about not breaking any road rules and especially speed limits.
Full Title: Comparing crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born US citizens in Texas
Despite its centrality to public and political discourse, we lack even basic information on fundamental questions regarding undocumented immigrants and crime.
This stems largely from data constraints.
Going beyond existing research, we utilize data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which checks and records the immigration status of all arrestees throughout the state.
Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born US citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.
Our findings help us understand why the most aggressive immigrant removal programs have not delivered on their crime reduction promises and are unlikely to do so in the future.
Not great for those that revel in the excitement of Enforcement Theatre.
The problem is that facts are useless against bigotry.
Specifically: According to Wikipedia there were about 1.7 M undocumented people in Texas as of 2023. The study estimates 96.2 violent crimes per year per 100K for that same population. So that is about 1,635 violent crimes per year that should not happen. Across all the categories they present, its 308.8 crimes per 100K per year- so for the undocumented population that means about 5,250 crimes per year that in theory should not happen (if there were 0 undocumented people in Texas).
The fact that the rate is lower for native-born or legal immigrants is immaterial to the argument advanced by those seeking more enforcement of immigration laws. Now, there are many, many aspects of the current administration's approach that can be debated and will probably not stand up well to scrutiny, but its important to understand the arguments being made if we are honestly interested in engaging in discussion and improvement.
Another interesting thing: From the study results I think that if you did drop the number of undocumented people in Texas to 0, the crime rates would actually increase, even as the absolute number of crimes dropped. And the number would only drop if those removed were not replaced with (for example) legal immigrants.
Yes. But making their arguments into different, milder, sanitized and whitewashed ones is NOT understanding them. It is carrying water for them. As of now, both their rhetorics and actions match perfectly. There is zero reason to think this is about crime levels.
> The fact that the rate is lower for native-born or legal immigrants is immaterial to the argument advanced by those seeking more enforcement of immigration laws
When the deportations are done in an orderly manner and without visible abuses, these people are unhappy. When they are done with visible abuses, then they feel like they are getting what they wanted. They do not particularly like the focus on lawbreakers either, their own rhetoric casts violent law breaking as something good - if done by the right side. In fact, when only illegal immigrants are deported, they act like something was missing.
If we are honest to ourselves about what they want and openly talk about, they want white ethnostate. They have issue with legal migrants and with non white citizens too. They have issue with EU having non whites in it. Somehow, their primary targets are cities with relatively low illegal immigration rather then ... Texas with much higher illegal immigration.
My suspicion is that crimes of passion woud be the same. A fight due to an emotional issue, murder when discovering your partner in bed with another, those emotional moments which can lead to violence.
An illegal alien may even curtail alcohol to keep a clearer head, thus resulting in fewer crimes of drunkenness.
In Italy there is statistical evidence that illegal immigrants are overrepresented in terms of arrests/convictions. That being said, the data underneath is often hard to judge without bias. Police is more likely to arrest and investigate an illegal compared to a local. Other factors include weighting for age and other socio economical factors.
Illegals are often young adults, male and financially weak: exactly the demographic that is more prone to crime regardless of its ethnical background or nationality. When you normalize for those factors you find out that illegal immigrants are not statistically likelier to commit crime than young Italian unemployed males.
Data is difficult to collect and even harder to analyze, and you can twist data to tell you what you want to hear. In order to really shape legislative action you need to invest in data collection and analysis first.
The study doesn't mention repeat offenses, so I can only assume they sampled both first-offenders and repeat-offenders. If illegal immigrant offenders get deported rather than jailed, the statistics would be lower than if they were sent to prison and allowed to return to crime afterwards.
Personally I think immigrating to the US illegally requires a level of social skills and level headedness that is negatively associated with criminality.
and now I sit here not believing I actually did that.
Optimization comes for us all :) I also have caught myself repeatedly skimming and scanning for that one salient point, feeling like "ain't nobody got time for all that verbiage".
Too much info, too little time, so gotta optimize.
TFA's TL;DR is midway through the abstract (which is itself the old school TL;DR):
> Relative to undocumented immigrants, US-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.
Which is sort of understandable, the undocumented immigrant may feel under constant watch or even persecuted and self-police their behavior.
Anecdotally, I've encountered this in academic contexts, where foreign students were way more apprehensive and careful, while native ones quite loose with their behaviors.
“Sanctuary cities” operate by not removing criminal undocumented immigrants.
Obama Administration Deported Record 1.5 Million People https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2012/12/24/16797...