By Matt Shuham
It’s election season, so Republicans are lying about immigrants again.
Over and over at [last] week’s Republican National Convention, politicians who know better — or who ought to — falsely said or implied that undocumented migrants and asylum seekers pose an unthinkable criminal threat to innocent, native-born Americans.
The reality is the opposite: According to available data, American citizens who were born here are vastly more homicidal than immigrants, including undocumented immigrants. And the vast majority of drugs recovered at the southern border arrive here in the vehicles of American citizens.
But you wouldn’t know that, listening to Republicans.
Donald Trump, accepting the Republican nomination Thursday, spoke ominously of an “invasion” of immigrants that had spread “misery, crime, poverty, disease and destruction to communities all across our land.” America, he said, has become a “dumping ground” for the world’s violent criminals. He promised the “largest deportation operation” in American history, pledging to Republicans: “I will not let these killers and criminals into our country.”
The night prior, as the RNC attendees held up signs calling for “Mass Deportations Now!” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott — who has deployed thousands of Texas troops in a yearslong, multibillion-dollar effort to turn the border into a militarized zone — growled: “Biden has welcomed into our country rapists, murderers, even terrorists! And the price that we have paid has been deadly.”
The facts simply don’t support these incendiary claims.
Texas Data Shows The Truth About ‘Migrant Crime’
Case-by-case data on crime rates among native-born American citizens, undocumented people and immigrants with some form of documentation can be hard to come by. That’s because no state except Texas breaks down convictions and arrests among those groups for state-level crimes — and even in Texas, it can take time to investigate the details of a defendant’s citizenship.
But last month, the libertarian Cato Institute published a detailed study that dug into these distinctions over the past decade, breaking down Texas homicide statistics from 2013-2022.
The study found that the most homicidal Texans are actually native-born American citizens: The conviction rate for them was 3.0 per 100,000 people, compared to 2.2 per 100,000 for “illegal” immigrants and 1.2 per 100,000 for “legal” immigrants. The trend held for arrest rates, too, not just convictions.
“When it comes to forming public policy and calling for mass deportations, we have to look at the evidence, the numbers, and they do not support the idea that there is an immigrant-driven crime wave in the United States — just the opposite,” Alex Nowrasteh, who authored the study, told HuffPost on Thursday.
If anything, Nowrasteh said, if policy makers wanted to lower crime rates, the data shows they should legally let in more immigrants — or, statistically speaking, “low-crime individuals.”
The study defined “legal” immigrants as foreign-born people who have formally received citizenship or who hold green cards, work permits or other forms of legal status. Authors noted their count of “illegal” immigrants closely matched the Department of Homeland Security’s count of “unauthorized” immigrants, which among other groups includes DACA recipients and those awaiting removal proceedings in immigration court.
Overall, “legal” immigrants were 61.4% less likely than native-born Americans to be convicted of homicide in Texas in that 10-year period, and “illegal” immigrants were 26.2% less likely than native-born Americans. Just looking at 2022 homicide conviction rates alone, the most recent year studied, that trend held: 4.9 per 100,000 for native-born Americans, compared to 3.1 per 100,000 for “illegal” immigrants and 1.8 per 100,000 for “legal” immigrants.
Immigrants of all stripes were also less likely to be arrested for homicide, not just convicted — even though, once arrested, “illegal” immigrants were convicted of homicide more often than “legal” immigrants or native-born Americans, the study found. The study speculated this could be the result of better prosecutions of “illegal” immigrants, less effective defenses or more cooperative witnesses or defendants in cases where “illegal” immigrants are charged.
Criminal conviction and arrest rates for all crimes over the 10-year period, not just homicides, followed the same pattern, the study found. These findings matched a 2018 study by Nowrasteh , reviewing conviction rates of all crimes in Texas in 2015, that similarly found native-born Texans were more likely to be convicts compared to immigrants of all stripes. As for arrest rates, “per 100,000 people in their respective groups, there were more arrests of natives for homicide, sex crimes, and larceny than there were arrests of illegal immigrants,” that study found. Yet another Cato study, published in 2020 , found incarceration rates in 2018 were lower for both “illegal” and “legal” immigrants than native-born Americans — and that was including incarceration related to immigration offenses. Similar studies found the same for several years prior .
Years Of Research Reach Similar Conclusions
Numerous studies have matched the observed trend of low crime and arrest rates among immigrants.
In 2020, sociologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that undocumented immigrants in Texas were half as likely as U.S.-born citizens to be arrested for violent crimes between 2012 and 2018 — that is, homicide, assault, robbery, sexual assault, burglary, theft and arson.
And as The New York Times noted Thursday , there’s simply no observable relationship between levels of immigration and the murder rate. “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes,” the paper reported. “There are genuine issues with the border and illegal immigration, but more crime is not one of them.”
The Times cited several sources backing up its point: The data analyst Jeff Asher, who focuses on crime statistics, found that “comparing violent crime rates in Texas border counties over time to violent crime in the U.S. and statewide in Texas shows no evidence of increasing violent crime along the U.S. border with Mexico.” A recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper found that “as a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the U.S.-born for 150 years,” and that, since 1960, immigrants’ incarceration rates have actually significantly declined relative to U.S.-born citizens.
The paper, written by economists from Stanford, Princeton, Northwestern and UC-Davis, speculated that the incarceration gap may be because “immigrants are concentrated in manual tasks and service occupations (rather than routine occupations), which did not experience large wage or employment declines in recent decades. … Furthermore, immigrants may be more resilient to shocks, given that they are a self-selected group of individuals possessing traits such as a greater willingness to move long distances … less risk aversion … higher adaptability and cognitive ability … and higher levels of entrepreneurship.”
Also, as the Times noted, immigrants have much more to lose than native-born Americans if they commit a crime: Not only do they face prison time, they also face deportation. For many who’ve arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in recent years, that means having wasted the thousands of dollars, and hundreds of miles of trekking through dangerous Latin American rainforest, to make their American dream come true. A migrant child sits in the back of a border patrol vehicle after being apprehended by U.S. Customs and Border protection officers on June 24 in Ruby, Arizona. At this week’s Republican National Convention, the southern border was a common topic of concern for speakers.
Despite hair-on-fire rhetoric from Republicans (and some Democrats ) about the risk of terrorists coming over the southern border, Nowrasteh found that there hasn’t been a single terrorist attack by someone who crossed the border illegally in recent decades. Between 1975–2023, there was only one attempted terrorist attack by perpetrators who crossed the southern border illegally: Three Macedonians, whose parents brought them into the United States in 1984 when they were 5 and younger, plotted over 20 years later to murder members of the U.S. military. They were convicted on a conspiracy charge and gun charges after meeting with a confidential government witness to buy firearms.
And, of course, aside from extremely rare incidents, all available evidence shows that noncitizens voting in federal elections simply does not happen .
“It would make sense [to target them] if illegal immigrants had a substantially higher crime rate,” Nowrasteh told HuffPost. “You [would be] focusing on a population that does more harm to people. But that’s not the case. So it’s even more ludicrous, in my mind, than that.”
Focusing on conducting a mass deportation program targeting millions of law-abiding people, he said, may catch a few heinous migrant criminals, but it would let even more heinous American-born criminals evade capture.
“If your goal is to reduce crime, you’re going to waste tons of law enforcement resources doing that. It’s going to take away from investigations of real crimes, and the result will not be a lower crime rate — it will be a slightly higher crime rate, if anything, and so you’re not going to ‘Make America Safe Again,’ which is what they want to do.”
American Citizens Are The Real Drug Smugglers
In addition to violent crime, Republicans have centered the role undocumented immigrants supposedly play in trafficking drugs into the United States — as Trump says, echoing Adolf Hitler , migrants are supposedly “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Though drug smuggling metrics are harder to measure than violent crime — there’s no dead body to investigate if someone successfully sneaks past border officials with drugs — available data does not support GOP claims.
Around 90% of illicit fentanyl is seized at border crossings — smuggled by people attempting to enter the country at a legal checkpoint — and nearly all couriers of that fentanyl were legally authorized to cross the border, including more than half who were U.S. citizens, NPR reported in August , citing U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
“Our analysis, our intelligence continues to point to most of what’s being smuggled at the ports of entry,” Troy Miller, the senior official performing the duties of commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, told NPR. “I’m not saying that there’s no narcotics being smuggled or hard narcotics being smuggled between the ports of entry, [but through ports of entry,] they’re able to hide the narcotics in legitimate travel. They’re able to surveil the travelers. They have preexisting logistics routes to move the narcotics quicker.”
The National Immigration Forum, similarly citing CBP data, reached a similar conclusion in October.
“Evidence indicates that illicit fentanyl is primarily brought to the U.S. by American citizens and usually through legal ports of entry,” NIF Assistant Vice President of Policy & Advocacy Christian Penichet-Paul wrote . “The calculation is simple: illicit drug smuggling organizations are likely to prefer U.S. citizens as smugglers because they are less likely to raise alarms or undergo additional vetting when re-entering the U.S. through a legal port.”
In fiscal year 2022, 88% of fentanyl trafficking offenders were American citizens, according to data released by the U.S. Sentencing Commission . In fiscal year 2023, accounting for all drugs and not just fentanyl, 81.9% of convicted traffickers were United States citizens.
And while Republicans insist that so-called “gotaways” who evade Border Patrol while crossing the border illegally could hypothetically constitute more of the nation’s illegal drug supply than we currently expect, there’s reason to be skeptical of that, too.
After all, “hard drugs at ports of entry are at least 96 percent less likely to be stopped than people crossing illegally between them,” the Cato Institute’s David J. Bier wrote in August , citing government data. Meanwhile, he observed, “at most, just 0.009 percent of the people arrested by Border Patrol for crossing illegally possessed any fentanyl whatsoever.”
Matt Shuham is a reporter on the HuffPost national desk.
This article was published on July 20, 2024 at HuffPost’s newsbreak.com.