Alex Nowrasteh
Alex Nowrasteh
High-profile crimes committed by illegal immigrants dominate the headlines, but the available evidence shows that illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. The federal government rightly seeks to exclude criminal illegal immigrants from the United States and remove those who commit crimes here. However, the good news is that illegal immigrants have a significantly lower crime rate than native-born Americans, whether you measure by estimates of nationwide incarceration rates, arrest rates, or criminal conviction rates.
The best research on illegal immigrant criminality uses data from Texas, which uniquely records arrest and conviction data for illegal and legal immigrants by crime. Of all the crimes recorded, homicide is most useful for comparing the relative crime rates of illegal immigrants with other subpopulations. People tend to report homicides, so the total number of homicides committed is closest to being known even if a substantial fraction are unsolved, which isn’t true for most other violent or property crimes.
Relatedly, homicide is a serious crime that most worries the public. Specifically in Texas, but likely in other states as well, state authorities thoroughly investigate the immigration statuses of people convicted of the most serious crimes like homicide, so there is a more accurate count of convicted and incarcerated illegal immigrant murders than illegal immigrant criminals convicted of other offenses.
In Texas, the homicide conviction rate for illegal immigrants was 3.1 per 100,000 compared to 4.9 for native-born Americans in 2022. Illegal immigrants had a homicide conviction rate 35.6 percent below that of native-born Americans in 2022. Another way of describing the data is that illegal immigrants were 7.1 percent of Texas’ population in that year and were convicted of only 5 percent of all homicides. Native-born Americans made up 82.5 percent of Texas’ population but accounted for 90.5 percent of all people convicted of homicide
For over a decade, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-georgia-have-low-incarceration-rate