This is a good piece, and you are correct that people on the right often make bad arguments when it comes to immigration and crime. One causal channel you don't address is: more immigrants –> more Democratic voters –> Democrats win elections –> less "tough on crime" policies.
The more common reaction is immigrants come in —> some natives get big mad —> nativist RWers win elections. You have a simply story of immigrants affecting institutions and you don’t consider the counter evidence.
Considering immigrants and children of immigrants are quite a bit more left-wing on average, his point is valid. California is the poster child of the demographic tipping point, but the real deal is when this happens nationally.
Their politics are way to the right though. Texas, Arizona, and Florida are doing things that were unimaginable twenty years ago on a wide range of issues. See here.
Arizona way to the right? On what basis? In the last election, Democrats won. We are officially a purple state. The only area in which the "right" have done well is school choice but that's under perpetual attack from the Democrats.
Florida GOP has benefited from a mass migration of boomers to their state and a political realignment of White Hispanics. Texas and Arizona simply have not reached their demographic tipping point yet. Their Latinos are more Republican than California Latinos, but they’re crucially still majority Democrat. When the tipping point is reached, expect their politics to shift substantially leftward. This is a last hurrah you’re witnessing.
Florida has a high cuban population which is very white. They're alienated by the woke stuff and Desantis is big on going against the woke stuff. at least on paper.
California is the perfect counterpoint. Once the demographic tipping point was reached, it became a woke, one-party state. Texas and Florida still haven’t reached that point, but Arizona is almost there.
The lesson in California is “don’t listen to nativists.” The only tipping point in 1994 was the CA GOP going full nativist. If demographics explained the political shift then Texas would be just as blue.
I never said demographics is the only explanation. It is true that Texas Latinos are more Republican-leaning than California Latinos, but they are still majority Democrat/liberal-voting despite extensive overtures from the GOP. Texas IS gradually turning blue.
Plus, a GOP that absorbs large numbers of Latinos will in all likelihood gradually abandon libertarianism and support more economically populist policies to better align themselves with their new voter pool.
This is based on the premise that Republicans will be unwilling and unable to change their messaging to avoid being marginalized. This doesn't seem to be true, Republicans have done a better job at picking up immigrant and minority voters in the most recent elections than they have in the past.
This channel also assumes the Democrats won't moderate "soft on crime" policies in response to outrage over rising crime rates. This also seems untrue, many Democrats have done so, most famously Bill Clinton.
Not all tough on crime policies are good. Conservatives are as bad as progressives in thinking any old cosmetic effort that seems to take a problem seriously is thus a good and effective policy. Both progressives and conservatives start with moral intuitions (this thing makes me really mad!) and then sorts evidence to justify why they are mad.
Yeah, I think emotions can play a role in raising an alarm that something needs attention, but one can't say liberals are complete dumbasses for having hyperactive empathy and victim concern modules on their moral metrics without also noting conservatives can sometimes be dumbasses having hyperactive moral threat detection on their metrics as well. I think of crime the way I think of say climate change and conservative/liberal reactions to each are similar. Conservatives think they have to deny climate change is real and impactful because they think if that is admitted it will somehow justify just any old dipshit policy proposed to address it that signals concern more than doing something that takes costs and benefits seriously. Liberals have to deny crime because they think if they admit it will somehow justify any old dipshit policy that signals concern for crime more than doing something that takes costs and benefits seriously. And both sides just prefer an analysis that justifies their gut instincts and what makes them feel bad rather than godforbid something more complex. Maybe we just need to roundly ridicule the logic of "Empirical claim X must be resisted if it might be used to justify bad policy Y".
No, Democrats are lying on crime by skewing the reporting numbers or simply not submitting the data at all. You really need to take underreporting into account as many Democrat controlled areas have cut police funding (resulting in fewer people bothering to report crimes because police will not respond in a timely manner or actually solve their cases), elected "Social Justice" prosecutors that avoid charging members of minority demographics (particularly illegal immigrants who would then be subject to deportation), and illegal immigrants themselves are less likely to report crimes for fear of being deported.
Likewise, what limited recent data we do have from ICE implies that we are letting in people with significantly higher criminality than our average.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checks the background of illegal aliens they have in custody. But, the administration’s letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) shows that as of July 21, 2024, ICE let 435,719 convicted criminals and 226,847 people with pending criminal charges in their home countries into the U.S.
Of those cleared by ICE, 13,099 have convictions for homicide, and another 1,845 were facing criminal charges. Some 9,461 have convictions for sex offenses (not including assault or commercialized sex), and 2,659 face pending charges. The convictions include other crimes such as assault (62,231), robbery (10,031), sexual assault (15,811), weapons offenses (13,423), and dangerous drugs (56,533).
About 7.4 million noncitizens are in the “national docket data,” so 662,776 is 9% of the total, and if one extrapolates the numbers to the homicide rate in this country, it strongly indicates that the government is letting migrants into this country who commit murder at a rate 50% higher than the rest of the U.S. population.
And these numbers clearly underestimate the crime rate of these noncitizens. The noncitizens in the “national docket data” turned themselves in to border agents for processing or were caught. Those who don’t turn themselves in are obviously far more likely to have something to hide from those doing the processing, so-called “gotaways,” who are observed illegally entering the U.S. but not caught or turned back.
These figures coincide with other data from the Arizona prison system and show illegal aliens commit crime at much higher rates than Americans or legal immigrants.
Incidentally, when Trump talks about specific examples of illegal aliens doing gruesomely horrific things to people, he's usually referencing MS13, which his administration made a point of addressing. MS-13 has mottos consistent with its rules, beliefs, expectations and reputation, including the Spanish “mata, viola, controla,” which translates to “kill, rape, control.” They're notorious for the fact that their initiation for new members requires them to kill someone.
ICE is the only source ever finding a high immigrant crime rate, and they don’t make their data available to researchers who ask and have a financial incentive to make the problem seem bigger since they want more funding.
The 13,000 murderers thing is also misinformation. Google will suffice to help you on this. It’s such a huge lie that the fact that it got into conservative media should tell you something and change how you gather your information.
The problem is that you rely on right-wing media and twitter personalities, and it’s impossible in any one piece to refute all the lies and misinformation they spread.
To have any hope of being in touch with reality, you need to start with the assumption that everything they say needs to be checked by credible sources. Otherwise you’ll always have false information in your head and nobody is going to have enough time to correct everything you believe that is wrong.
I read the tweets and many of the replies, including replies of replies and other long debate threads. I don't see the slam dunk you are suggesting exists there. Could you be more specific as to which exact posts you mean?
What I do see:
1. Disagreement for unclear reasons about how many police precincts aren't reporting to the FBI at all. Cremieux says it's gone back to being very low percentage-wise, others say it's still 35%+. I couldn't work out given a few seconds scan read why the numbers disagree. There seems to be general agreement that the places that don't report are in very Democrat parts of America, which is suspicious, as that's exactly what you'd expect to see if Democrats are trying to hide the true crime numbers.
2. Someone points out that survey data doesn't match. I don't have a WSJ subscription so can't read this article but it states clearly in the headline that people in surveys are reporting much higher crime rates than the government is reporting:
3. Cremieux does point out that the FBI data is of very low reliability. They routinely make large revisions to the data silently post-publication. It is reasonable for people to have low confidence in the integrity of this data.
4. Someone asks if everywhere is reporting race. Cremieux says that whilst (he claims) reporting levels are very high, "they might be missing supplementary data sometimes". In other words, he doesn't seem sure that the coverage on racial information is as high as reporting coverage overall. This seems like a problem.
Overall I just don't see a clear winner in this debate. Many replies bring up major data quality problems he doesn't have a good answer to.
You can look at individual cities that report their murder rates publicly. The vast majority report significant declines. I don’t see what stuff like reporting race has to do with whether crime is going up or down.
I responded to the WSJ piece above (or below, wherever it is). It’s talking about 2019-2023, so basically the Trump years when crime went up. This whole debate is whether crime is up under Biden. It’s a very sneaky thing that they’re doing, only one step up from Twitter disinformation being spread on this topic.
I replied about the WSJ on the other thread, let's continue it there.
The individual cities argument would only work if all cities were identical. If some cities advertised widely that they would not prosecute racial minorities, then it would make sense that criminals would go there knowing they can commit crimes and get away with it. You'd expect that to lower crime rates elsewhere and raise them in the easy going cities. If the easy going cities then stop reporting to cover up what's happening you can get a mismatch in what people think is occurring (crime at minimum moving around and quite likely increasing in some areas), and what government data claims is occurring (crime falling everywhere).
Yes, Black crime is the highest demographic by race in America and Democrats tend to do everything they can to hide that data on the theory that it encourages racism and shield black offenders from persecution on the theory that our prison population demographics should match the free population's demographics despite the disparity in who offends...
AND illegal immigrants also have higher crime rates than our national average as we know it. It IS possible that after accounting for underreporting in Black crime that illegal immigrant crime (besides the offense of illegal entry) would technically be lower than the average, but "they're marginally more law abiding than inner city gang members" still wouldn't be a rousing endorsement for dropping them in Midwestern small towns by the thousands where they ARE well above the local average for criminality...
AND Democrats have a proven track record of specifically ordering local law enforcement to not cooperate with ICE, of specifically opposing laws that would make it easier to deport illegals convicted of other crimes, of specifically opposing any law or technology that would likely catch illegal immigrants (such as E-Verify), of suppressing media stories and information regarding crime committed by illegal immigrants, of leaking warnings to employers ahead of ICE raids, of Democrat government officials (specifically including DAs and Prosecutors) dropping charges to get confirmed illegal immigrants out of jail despite ICE detainer requests, of those same public officials very publicly declaring in favor of actively shielding illegal immigrants from federal law enforcement, of Democrats bringing lawsuits to try to stop Republican states from attempting to stop illegal immigration, of Democrats opposing cleaning voter rolls (which is required by federal law already) even after illegal immigrants are found on them, of Democrats claiming that we can't have a question about citizenship on the census because illegals would be afraid to have any contact with a government agency (seriously, if they're going to underreport because they're too afraid to answer a census question about their household it's absurd to suggest that they won't underreport even more when it comes to calling the cops to report crimes against their household).
Yes, Black crime is higher than our average AND illegal immigrant crime is higher than our average AND Democrats continually try to hide BOTH those facts. These facts are not contradictory, they are complementary.
Nothing kills my defense of a client's case more than a positive DNA hit. The courts are generous with funding top-level national DNA defense experts (I nabbed an author of the 2009 NAS report for example) but the only thing those are typically good for is affirming how fucked my client is. Even my clients, constituting a demographic notorious for fabulism, know they can't worm their way out of it. They'll start with "well maybe I randomly shook hands with the guy who actually did it and then..." and trail off into embarrassment at how fucking dumb they sound.
One problem though is that DNA is typically only collected after you are convicted. I had a case where detectives stalked this suspect with no criminal record in public over the course of several days, desperately hoping to collect any stray spit he might have left on random Gatorade bottles, only to find out he was uninvolved.
I used to work at the ACLU, and I feel my back rankle as I'm about to write this sentence but...maybe DNA should be collected for every newborn baby and immigrant and visitor in this country. It's a very simple cheek swab, and while I can understand the nebulous privacy concerns in the abstract, holy fuck would it be a boon for law enforcement's ability to solve crimes.
The only concern would be the government misusing it. Imagine we have some backsliding towards dictatorship, and the American government starts to look like China's. They could easily use that DNA to track down people like anonymous investigative journalists.
That's a valid concern, but a national DNA database is not what would augur an authoritarian government, and an authoritarian government wouldn't stop itself from creating a national DNA database. If that did happen, I think we'd have much bigger worries than a pre-existing DNA database.
> I used to work at the ACLU, and I feel my back rankle as I'm about to write this sentence but...maybe DNA should be collected for every newborn baby and immigrant and visitor in this country. It's a very simple cheek swab, and while I can understand the nebulous privacy concerns in the abstract, holy fuck would it be a boon for law enforcement's ability to solve crimes.
Hasn't this to some extent already happened with the rise of 23andme and other voluntary DNA databases? While the killer may not have given over his DNA, it's quite possible a cousin, father, brother, etc has, which has allowed tracking down perpetrators in very old cold cases. If the government offered (say) $100 to people in exchange for a cheek swab, the voluntarily-given info would almost certainly provide more than enough data to locate almost any criminal.
Yes, it's clearly gotten easier, but it's not yet complete. A lot of DNA testing fails to return an immediate CODIS match, which means that follow-ups require specific investigations and search warrants. A voluntary incentive program would be a great start.
The author knows full well that his data set is out of date, groups all immigrants in with illegal immigrants, and does not included (nor can it include) unreported crimes - in particular illegal immigrant on illegal immigrant crime. This post also fails to account for leftoid manipulation of statistics at the reporting level, sanctuary city relaxing of regulations, and overall two tier justice enforcement.
Furthermore, while Haitians in Springfield or Venezualans in Aurora might be a small sample, that is only 2 towns out of MANY that are experiencing these issues. To simply dismiss this as too small of a sample is a bottom up data guy way of seeing the problem. From the top down view, ONE instance of this insanity is too many. The system is broken, the government (as currently operating) is the enemy of every citizen who understands that the only type of justice that matters is blind justice, but I repeat myself.
Because people are people and inherently valuable. To not care about the trials and suffering of immigrant children solely because they are illegal is to deny their humanity and consequently our own as well.
You say those children should be kept out of the country for the benefit of American citizens, and that this is somehow for their own good? Either all men are created equal and hence get equal moral consideration, or not; you're trying to have it both ways.
“Conservatives are lying on immigrant crime” is a straw man. For conservatives to lie about immigrant crime, they would have to be referring to immigrant crime. They aren’t. What they are typically referring to is ILLEGAL immigrant crime which, by name, is 100%.
Let’s even ignore the fact that crossing our borders illegally is a crime all by itself, that they all committed. It takes all but 5 seconds to find many documentaries, new and old, on how dangerous illegal immigration is. If it doesn’t take you 5 seconds to find a documentary, surely you could simply ask any illegal immigrant about it. Lazy.
My half brother crossed the border from the Dominican Republic for $4k, despite my warnings, and he was abducted and almost died. He barely escaped. He left his wife and kids in his home country for a “better life”, ignoring the fact that he barely even speaks English. His wife immediately started cheating on him and he could only scrape by with underpaid jobs (basically slave labor) from the few employers that would even hire him.
Not even the “American Dream” democrats are trying to give these illegal immigrants is possible because all of us are barely surviving in our economy. Now with a giant surge of new, cheap, underpaid, slave labor, companies have even additional incentive to not charge higher wages. Being poor and destitute in America sucks just as much as living in any third world country, I would know and you should too. Just look with your eyes, stop looking with your pen and political bias. Lives are being ruined and are in turmoil from these god awful policies to excuse illegal immigration even for the illegal immigrants.
Let’s not even dive into how we cheat every legal immigrant. They spend years getting into this country properly and work too hard to be bypassed by human traffickers and criminals.
If you would like further details on my anecdote, I am happy to provide.
illegal, legal is literally just a meaningless government label. All the government has to do is register them as legal residents and now they're legal. Reagan even did that .
You're absolutely correct. Im not criticizing the use of the term illegal because i want illegal immigrants here. Im criticizing it because I want to drastically reduce immigration as whole regardless of legal status. I think perhaps even a temporary pause on all immigration would be ideal. As a study was done that stated the sweet spot for American population size is actually some where around 150 million. We're well above that.
I think what you’re identifying is the precise issue. The idea of something being illegal has meaning. The fact that Reagan did what he did was wrong and set a bad precedent. Illegal means something and we need to keep people accountable.
R. Hanania understands it is completely disingenuous to use data from the 2000s like he does, so it is rich for him to claim that conservatives are lying. As if nothing has changed in the last 20 years politically for our nations Southern neighbors. We had the fall of Venezuela to communism, and the fall of Mexico to the narco terrorists.
Eh most Venezuelans have the low IQ belief that Chavez was great, but Maduro ruined everything. They’ll probably bring their populist inclinations to America
"In the end, I think we all know that most people who oppose immigration don’t really care what the numbers say. They dislike people who are different, and don’t want them around"
I don't think that's true. I don't have a problem with people who are better than me (often Jews, East Asians), just with those that are worse than me.
Culture is Downstream of genetics. At some point immigrants' descendants return to their "natural" behavior. Just look at how second and third generation immigrants behave in Germany
As a Jew who’s better than you, I recommend maybe you should consider accepting that you’re intellectually unfit to make sound judgements on these matters, and instead just defer to your genetic superiors.
With guys like these responding to you, the immigration you oppose should be mainly of the elite kind. A resentful foreign elite is worse than a hard-working but criminally prone underclass.
I disagree. Intelligent people respond to incentives well, they can be controlled. Intelligence is a blessing. I'm sure Josh Rosenberg is more beneficial to society and himself than the average African. Josh may insult me but he's less likely to engage in pointless violence.
No you are not. And that’s ok! It’s not your fault that you’re stupid. You were born that way. We’ll be judged by the compassion we show for the least among us. That’s where you come in.
This argument is so bad. It assumes that the only way to allow immigrants into our country is randomly, like dipping a spoon into a pot. Wrong. We have the right and obligation to try and screen criminals before they blend into society. If the government drops that obligation entirely, as it has done, then every crime committed by an unscreened immigrant represents an unforced error of the government.
And that doesn’t even account for the facts that 1. All illegal immigration IS crime and 2. We have NO IDEA how many people have crossed our border, so arguments on proportion are just guesses
"All illegal immigration IS crime" is a ludicrous argument. On the same basis, probably ALL Americans are criminals or at least guilty of misdemeanors. Not all "crimes" are equal. People who sheltered "enemies of the state" from Stalin's agents were criminals but not in a way that is remotely bad.
I don’t think I agree with that, although I admit that if I didn’t comprehend it, as you suggest, then of course I wouldn’t agree. My point is that the government has an obligation to screen immigrants in an attempt to protect you and me and to add value to our country. If they neglect that obligation, all crimes committed by the unscreened illegal immigrants are evidence of government failure. In the alternative world where immigrants are all screened, some crime would ensue, but it would 1. Probably be a lot less than current levels and 2. Exist in the context of a government that had met its obligation. I don’t see how baseline population levels of crime are relevant. Even if we were a horribly crime ridden society and bring in immigrants made us safer proportionally, the obligation to screen would still be in place and all additional crimes would be unforced errors if that obligation were not met.
Here is the argument that maybe you meant to make: "every crime committed by an unscreened immigrant _above the baseline population level_ represents an unforced error of the government". If you did in fact mean to make the argument as originally worded then I think you did not comprehend the post.
This post does not attempt to argue that illegal immigration is right, or that it is right and proper to let criminals immigrate, and the author's other writing generally supports using immigration to boost human capital, which involves picking and choosing who you let in. The argument is rather that it is dumb to try to ensure the incoming population commits literally zero crime, and that we should instead ensure they commit less crime than current native baseline, which the post argues already happens "naturally".
And having seen it from the other side, legal immigrants are in fact screened rather heavily, not just formally but also by populational factors like "who is actually determined and/or resourceful enough to try".
I can't understand this insatiable appetite for Somalis, Bangladeshis, Hondurans, and Malawis. Do you wish to live in an advanced space-faring nation - a large and serene Switzerland - or in a bumper to bumper twerking hybrid of Honduras and Bangladesh?
1) Adjusting for the age and sex of immigrants makes no sense. If immigrants are disportionately male and young, and that group commits more crime, OF COURSE that's relevant to the question of whether immigration affects crime. I appreciate that you tried to address this counterclaim, but this is extremely weak.
2) even more importantly, the critical question for the American voter is not "do immigrants commit more crime?" but rather "Will I or my loved ones be more likely to become a victim of crime because of immigration". This means it makes no sense to speak in terms of crimes in total.
What matters is the number of crimes committed against *strangers* or their property. So right from the start you need to ignore things like nonviolent drug crimes, white collar crime, not paying child support, parental neglect, parole violations that stem from the above, etc. Even things like domestic violence are irrelevant for this discussion. All that matters are crimes involving assault, robbery, homicide, theft, vandalism, and so forth by parties unknown to the victim. So the question is, do immigrants, and especially illegal immigrants, commit more of these types of crimes?
And more specifically, for the individual, "do I as a male/female middle-class/poor/rich, white/black/Asian person face a greater risk from immigrants than another American citizen randomly chosen adjusted for the demographics in the area where I live? For example, if I'm a 20 year old white woman in a previously safe neighborhood, does it matter for my safety that the state is subsidizing the housing of a dozen 25 year old Venezuelan males two blocks from my home? It DOES NOT MATTER, from the perspective of that white woman, that Han Chinese immigrants entering black neighborhoods somewhere else in the country cancels out any greater risk she personally incurs once the statistics are aggregated.
“Voters are in the end irrational and want mutually contradictory things. The proper role of Elite Human Capital is to decide which goals are humane and noble, and which attitudes and preferences should be ignored or even suppressed.”
Rejecting alien phenotypes is not Athens expelling Themistocles. I’m talking about property rights. Once upon a time there were racial covenants and freedom of association but “noble” and “humane” “EHC” abolished those liberties because they “know better” than the “irrational” voters (of course, any preference or view one doesn’t like can be labeled irrational; it’s just a cheap version of “false consciousness”). As taxpayers, natives have de facto ownership of the streets, roads, etc. but libertarian open borders types suddenly become socialists when it comes to the “irrational” property owners (aka the voters) exercising their property rights. When it comes to “democracy”, they prefer the attitude of Bertolt Brecht, who famously said the East German communists should “elect a new people”. There is also the amusing irony of denigrating the preferences and alleged stupidity of white voters while bleeding for immigrants (much in the same way liberals bleed for blacks), many of whom are even dumber than the natives.
Just like Norman Podhoretz once did, Bryan Caplan openly calls for miscegenation to eliminate racial/ethnic antagonism. But wouldn’t that solve the problem of the Jews? RH hypocritically defends “ethnocentrism for me but not for thee” when it comes to the Jews, but who cares if Jews disappear as long as it’s done via peaceful miscegenation? Does that only apply to white nations?
The example was for the more general point of "elected oligarchy" being preferable to "true democracy".
As for the content of your (strongly inflammatory, but I'll try to steelman) comment:
1. You can both bleed for someone and consider their preferences dumb and wrong. This is what consistently happens with people steering people - and should happen if empathy is a good thing because people's preferences, when taken in aggregate (and democracy takes them in aggregate), are _always_ so simplified as to be dumb, wrong, and contradictory.
2. The "I paid taxes for things government does, therefore I own (a share in) everything government creates" is a falsehood promulgated across political spectra, which doesn't make it less of a falsehood. You pay government for some services, this doesn't make you the owner of things it creates, even if it uses said things for providing that service. An apt analogy is paying a butcher, which doesn't make you the owner of the knife they use to cut meat.
3. Regarding "miscegenation" - assortative mating of some kind will happen unless some highly coercive methodology to enforce otherwise would be employed, methodology neither Caplan nor Hanania, both people much more libertarian than I am, would recommend. But prohibiting miscegenation would be a kludgy, ineffective, and morally wrong proxy for assortative mating. Ethnic groups delendae sunt.
Re: #2: Under libertarianism the streets would be fully privatized; in the absence of privatization, the natives have de facto ownership. This is not like remotely like consumers owning the knives in a privately owned butcher shop simply because they are used to cut the meat. A more apt analogy to government controlled streets would be if the butcher shops were state-funded enterprises. In that case, the tax-payers would indeed own the knives.
The state is negative sum and should be eliminated. But the streets could be privately owned before that happens. If you are against collective ownership, then you should be against state “ownership” (control) of the the streets. Also, just because the streets are controlled by the government doesn’t mean that they have any clue what the optimum number of immigrants are, i.e., the number of immigrants that would be invited if the streets were privately owned. In the absence of privatization, there is only de facto ownership by the natives. “Nobility” and “humaneness” (neoliberal wordcel talk) doesn’t override this de facto ownership anymore than “humaneness” requires that a private employer must hire a Hispanic or that you are required to invite a Hispanic into your home. If the streets were privately owned but, say, the parks were government controlled, would that mean that we must have open borders? Obviously not. But when we have road socialism, it means exactly that to the open borders libertarians.
Voters do not have property rights. There is no such thing as a collective property right. As an actual Libertarian, I support eliminating anti-discrimination laws except as applied to governments, eliminating most of the welfare state, and increased legal immigration. You can argue about the order in which those should happen, but the overall programme is coherent.
If you are an “actual libertarian”, you should support privatization of the streets and total elimination of the welfare state. In the absence of full privatization, the natives have de facto ownership of the streets. Collective ownership is not desirable but it is imposed by government control.
“Yet this perspective takes an unusually long-term view, and if you are really that worried about crime, trying to engineer the perfect demographic composition of the population a generation from now is probably not the best thing you could be doing with your time. “
Why is worrying about a medium-term trend to higher crime rates nationally (due to second, third gen etc hispanics africans) a weird concern? And then your solution is that we could have a bukele, who is an extreme anomaly.
It is prudent to take into consideration medium to long teem effects in crime and welfare that the children of migrants will have.
It is not prudent to fling open the borders hoping that we can implement keyhole solutions that are politically infeasible now and will only become moreso with changing demographic composition
“It’s a very weird objection, and it makes me wonder what is going on when people make this argument. “
Again, I think you are being willfully obtuse.
Thankfully, black crime is generally geographically isolated.
If you admit an immigrant group to a city, and that group is more criminal than native whites, but less criminal than blacks that makes a city—and increasing portions of it—more unlivable, despite the (first gen) immigrant group being significantly better than blacks
I agree that Trump's rhetoric on the issue is completely unhelpful and out of bounds. However, I think you are completely wrong to dismiss the underlying issue out of hand.
"Conservatives got upset at the ABC moderators fact checking Trump on his claim that the crime rate was up, but the FBI statistics were just released, and the media was right while Trump was wrong"
Actually, there is good reason to think that Trump was right.
"The nation’s largest crime survey says otherwise: Crime rates haven’t been falling, and urban crime is far worse than it was in the pre-George Floyd era. The new findings were released this month by the National Crime Victimization Survey. Run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau, the NCVS dates to the Nixon administration and is one of the largest federal surveys on any topic. It asks some 230,000 U.S. residents annually whether they’ve been the victims of crimes. It then asks about the nature of the crime, whether it was reported to the police, the demographics of the perpetrator and other particulars."
Furthermore, the data you provide is almost all out of date. The very little data that you have that actually differentiates between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants covers Texas only.
The fact of the matter is, there is good reason to not want a system where pretty much anyone can crash the border, make a bogus asylum claim, and then never get deported unless they get convicted of a felony.
The whole debate is about whether the crime rate is up under Biden because we’re discussing this in the context of an election season where Trump is running on that idea. This article says that crime is up from 2019 to 2023, when the increase is pretty much completely due to the last two years that Trump was in office. Trump and conservatives are just lying with regards to the main thing they’re running on. If they want to say crime is up since Trump’s term and hasn’t gone back to what it was yet, that’s different.
No, what the article says is that the government's data fails a cross-check. Unless you have some compelling reason to believe official statistics have experienced a massive increase in reliability recently, or that survey takers have become systematically less reliable for some reason, then what it implies is that the data quality is _still_ poor and that therefore making contradictory claims about it is fair game.
If people don't like Trump making "wrong" statements about the output of government counting processes for immigration, crime or voting then you need to ensure the data quality is beyond reproach. Otherwise it just turns into more of the flea-brained "elitism" of the past years in which garbage-tier government data is used to prove people "wrong" and then we all discover a few years later that actually it was everyone who believed the government who was wrong. But such people never update!
Well done. I'm amazed at how skeptical the elites are when people are screaming about an issue as if they are just pulling it out of thin air. This whole article and many pieces from Richard seem to bend over backwards to avoid admitting the politically unpopular thing.
Ron Unz makes a similar argument. Hispanic immigrants ethnically cleansed African-Americans from East Palo Alto, which was once the "murder capital of the U.S." and everyone in Palo Alto is very happy about that. https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Unz-UR-RaceCrime.pdf
The mere existence of non-trivial levels of immigrant crime is evidence of a lack of sovereign control of the border, which is itself a problem. America should have a choice over who it lets into the country, and the correct number of criminals should be zero. And criminals should definitely be deported. The fact that there is a non-trivial number of immigrant criminals; and they aren't immediately deported as soon as they are arrested; and nobody seems to be able to do anything about this, is in itself a problem.
The basic premise is that an open southern border is attracting a population of illegal immigrants that are more criminally active than most Americans, but perhaps not as criminally active as blacks (who are have horrific rates of criminal offending).
I don't think anything you've said in this article refutes that.
To contrast that with the left narrative on police brutality/mass incarceration which conveniently left out the horrific stats on black criminality. Those specific facts about black crime refuted the entire narrative upon which cities were burned.
Way more truth to Trump's narrative than the nonsense we witnessed in 2020...not the same.
This is a good piece, and you are correct that people on the right often make bad arguments when it comes to immigration and crime. One causal channel you don't address is: more immigrants –> more Democratic voters –> Democrats win elections –> less "tough on crime" policies.
The more common reaction is immigrants come in —> some natives get big mad —> nativist RWers win elections. You have a simply story of immigrants affecting institutions and you don’t consider the counter evidence.
Considering immigrants and children of immigrants are quite a bit more left-wing on average, his point is valid. California is the poster child of the demographic tipping point, but the real deal is when this happens nationally.
In which US states has that happened?
Texas, Florida, Arizona, California in 1980s-1990s (reversed in 2010s).
In three out of four of those states, the Democrat vote share in 2020 was higher than in 2000.
Their politics are way to the right though. Texas, Arizona, and Florida are doing things that were unimaginable twenty years ago on a wide range of issues. See here.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/conservatives-win-all-the-time
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/02/magazine/texas-politics-billionaire-preachers.html
Arizona way to the right? On what basis? In the last election, Democrats won. We are officially a purple state. The only area in which the "right" have done well is school choice but that's under perpetual attack from the Democrats.
Florida GOP has benefited from a mass migration of boomers to their state and a political realignment of White Hispanics. Texas and Arizona simply have not reached their demographic tipping point yet. Their Latinos are more Republican than California Latinos, but they’re crucially still majority Democrat. When the tipping point is reached, expect their politics to shift substantially leftward. This is a last hurrah you’re witnessing.
didn't Arizona just go blue? lol
Florida has a high cuban population which is very white. They're alienated by the woke stuff and Desantis is big on going against the woke stuff. at least on paper.
Look at the policies, Noah. Those are what matter.
California is the perfect counterpoint. Once the demographic tipping point was reached, it became a woke, one-party state. Texas and Florida still haven’t reached that point, but Arizona is almost there.
The lesson in California is “don’t listen to nativists.” The only tipping point in 1994 was the CA GOP going full nativist. If demographics explained the political shift then Texas would be just as blue.
https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned-california-blue
I never said demographics is the only explanation. It is true that Texas Latinos are more Republican-leaning than California Latinos, but they are still majority Democrat/liberal-voting despite extensive overtures from the GOP. Texas IS gradually turning blue.
Plus, a GOP that absorbs large numbers of Latinos will in all likelihood gradually abandon libertarianism and support more economically populist policies to better align themselves with their new voter pool.
Oh, no. Nowrasteh the Pokemon able to utter nothing but one thing - "More Immigrants!"
What counter evidence?
This is based on the premise that Republicans will be unwilling and unable to change their messaging to avoid being marginalized. This doesn't seem to be true, Republicans have done a better job at picking up immigrant and minority voters in the most recent elections than they have in the past.
This channel also assumes the Democrats won't moderate "soft on crime" policies in response to outrage over rising crime rates. This also seems untrue, many Democrats have done so, most famously Bill Clinton.
Not all tough on crime policies are good. Conservatives are as bad as progressives in thinking any old cosmetic effort that seems to take a problem seriously is thus a good and effective policy. Both progressives and conservatives start with moral intuitions (this thing makes me really mad!) and then sorts evidence to justify why they are mad.
that's not necessarily a bad thing. Morality is a very important thing. People who are not sociopaths think in terms of morality
Yeah, I think emotions can play a role in raising an alarm that something needs attention, but one can't say liberals are complete dumbasses for having hyperactive empathy and victim concern modules on their moral metrics without also noting conservatives can sometimes be dumbasses having hyperactive moral threat detection on their metrics as well. I think of crime the way I think of say climate change and conservative/liberal reactions to each are similar. Conservatives think they have to deny climate change is real and impactful because they think if that is admitted it will somehow justify just any old dipshit policy proposed to address it that signals concern more than doing something that takes costs and benefits seriously. Liberals have to deny crime because they think if they admit it will somehow justify any old dipshit policy that signals concern for crime more than doing something that takes costs and benefits seriously. And both sides just prefer an analysis that justifies their gut instincts and what makes them feel bad rather than godforbid something more complex. Maybe we just need to roundly ridicule the logic of "Empirical claim X must be resisted if it might be used to justify bad policy Y".
No, Democrats are lying on crime by skewing the reporting numbers or simply not submitting the data at all. You really need to take underreporting into account as many Democrat controlled areas have cut police funding (resulting in fewer people bothering to report crimes because police will not respond in a timely manner or actually solve their cases), elected "Social Justice" prosecutors that avoid charging members of minority demographics (particularly illegal immigrants who would then be subject to deportation), and illegal immigrants themselves are less likely to report crimes for fear of being deported.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/09/19/media_push_misleading_crime_stats_protect_democrat_narrative__151645.html
Likewise, what limited recent data we do have from ICE implies that we are letting in people with significantly higher criminality than our average.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checks the background of illegal aliens they have in custody. But, the administration’s letter to Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX) shows that as of July 21, 2024, ICE let 435,719 convicted criminals and 226,847 people with pending criminal charges in their home countries into the U.S.
Of those cleared by ICE, 13,099 have convictions for homicide, and another 1,845 were facing criminal charges. Some 9,461 have convictions for sex offenses (not including assault or commercialized sex), and 2,659 face pending charges. The convictions include other crimes such as assault (62,231), robbery (10,031), sexual assault (15,811), weapons offenses (13,423), and dangerous drugs (56,533).
About 7.4 million noncitizens are in the “national docket data,” so 662,776 is 9% of the total, and if one extrapolates the numbers to the homicide rate in this country, it strongly indicates that the government is letting migrants into this country who commit murder at a rate 50% higher than the rest of the U.S. population.
And these numbers clearly underestimate the crime rate of these noncitizens. The noncitizens in the “national docket data” turned themselves in to border agents for processing or were caught. Those who don’t turn themselves in are obviously far more likely to have something to hide from those doing the processing, so-called “gotaways,” who are observed illegally entering the U.S. but not caught or turned back.
These figures coincide with other data from the Arizona prison system and show illegal aliens commit crime at much higher rates than Americans or legal immigrants.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/10/01/the_new_data_on_migrant_crime_151712.html
Incidentally, when Trump talks about specific examples of illegal aliens doing gruesomely horrific things to people, he's usually referencing MS13, which his administration made a point of addressing. MS-13 has mottos consistent with its rules, beliefs, expectations and reputation, including the Spanish “mata, viola, controla,” which translates to “kill, rape, control.” They're notorious for the fact that their initiation for new members requires them to kill someone.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/mara-salvatrucha-deadliest-street-gang-america#:~:text=This%20research%20paper%20addresses%20Mara,exponentially%20into%20the%20United%20States.
https://www.boston.com/news/crime/2016/04/21/inside-ms-13-initiation-rituals-and-internal-feuds/
The stuff about Democrats cooking the books is false. See the debate in the replies here.
https://x.com/cremieuxrecueil/status/1838279300224815366?s=46&t=orlVw6DjQN9UUXnw_kVAkA
I linked to the tweet in the piece.
ICE is the only source ever finding a high immigrant crime rate, and they don’t make their data available to researchers who ask and have a financial incentive to make the problem seem bigger since they want more funding.
The 13,000 murderers thing is also misinformation. Google will suffice to help you on this. It’s such a huge lie that the fact that it got into conservative media should tell you something and change how you gather your information.
The problem is that you rely on right-wing media and twitter personalities, and it’s impossible in any one piece to refute all the lies and misinformation they spread.
To have any hope of being in touch with reality, you need to start with the assumption that everything they say needs to be checked by credible sources. Otherwise you’ll always have false information in your head and nobody is going to have enough time to correct everything you believe that is wrong.
>. you rely on twitter for your information
>. posts a Twitter link to try and prove his point
😂🤦
I read the tweets and many of the replies, including replies of replies and other long debate threads. I don't see the slam dunk you are suggesting exists there. Could you be more specific as to which exact posts you mean?
What I do see:
1. Disagreement for unclear reasons about how many police precincts aren't reporting to the FBI at all. Cremieux says it's gone back to being very low percentage-wise, others say it's still 35%+. I couldn't work out given a few seconds scan read why the numbers disagree. There seems to be general agreement that the places that don't report are in very Democrat parts of America, which is suspicious, as that's exactly what you'd expect to see if Democrats are trying to hide the true crime numbers.
2. Someone points out that survey data doesn't match. I don't have a WSJ subscription so can't read this article but it states clearly in the headline that people in surveys are reporting much higher crime rates than the government is reporting:
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/contrary-to-media-myth-u-s-urban-crime-rates-are-up-violence-cities-9ce714f6
I see no response to that claim.
3. Cremieux does point out that the FBI data is of very low reliability. They routinely make large revisions to the data silently post-publication. It is reasonable for people to have low confidence in the integrity of this data.
4. Someone asks if everywhere is reporting race. Cremieux says that whilst (he claims) reporting levels are very high, "they might be missing supplementary data sometimes". In other words, he doesn't seem sure that the coverage on racial information is as high as reporting coverage overall. This seems like a problem.
Overall I just don't see a clear winner in this debate. Many replies bring up major data quality problems he doesn't have a good answer to.
You can look at individual cities that report their murder rates publicly. The vast majority report significant declines. I don’t see what stuff like reporting race has to do with whether crime is going up or down.
I responded to the WSJ piece above (or below, wherever it is). It’s talking about 2019-2023, so basically the Trump years when crime went up. This whole debate is whether crime is up under Biden. It’s a very sneaky thing that they’re doing, only one step up from Twitter disinformation being spread on this topic.
I replied about the WSJ on the other thread, let's continue it there.
The individual cities argument would only work if all cities were identical. If some cities advertised widely that they would not prosecute racial minorities, then it would make sense that criminals would go there knowing they can commit crimes and get away with it. You'd expect that to lower crime rates elsewhere and raise them in the easy going cities. If the easy going cities then stop reporting to cover up what's happening you can get a mismatch in what people think is occurring (crime at minimum moving around and quite likely increasing in some areas), and what government data claims is occurring (crime falling everywhere).
they are but crime is high because of black people typically regardless of location. it's not necessarily immigrants
This is properly a "Yes, AND", not a "Yes, BUT".
Yes, Black crime is the highest demographic by race in America and Democrats tend to do everything they can to hide that data on the theory that it encourages racism and shield black offenders from persecution on the theory that our prison population demographics should match the free population's demographics despite the disparity in who offends...
AND illegal immigrants also have higher crime rates than our national average as we know it. It IS possible that after accounting for underreporting in Black crime that illegal immigrant crime (besides the offense of illegal entry) would technically be lower than the average, but "they're marginally more law abiding than inner city gang members" still wouldn't be a rousing endorsement for dropping them in Midwestern small towns by the thousands where they ARE well above the local average for criminality...
AND Democrats have a proven track record of specifically ordering local law enforcement to not cooperate with ICE, of specifically opposing laws that would make it easier to deport illegals convicted of other crimes, of specifically opposing any law or technology that would likely catch illegal immigrants (such as E-Verify), of suppressing media stories and information regarding crime committed by illegal immigrants, of leaking warnings to employers ahead of ICE raids, of Democrat government officials (specifically including DAs and Prosecutors) dropping charges to get confirmed illegal immigrants out of jail despite ICE detainer requests, of those same public officials very publicly declaring in favor of actively shielding illegal immigrants from federal law enforcement, of Democrats bringing lawsuits to try to stop Republican states from attempting to stop illegal immigration, of Democrats opposing cleaning voter rolls (which is required by federal law already) even after illegal immigrants are found on them, of Democrats claiming that we can't have a question about citizenship on the census because illegals would be afraid to have any contact with a government agency (seriously, if they're going to underreport because they're too afraid to answer a census question about their household it's absurd to suggest that they won't underreport even more when it comes to calling the cops to report crimes against their household).
Yes, Black crime is higher than our average AND illegal immigrant crime is higher than our average AND Democrats continually try to hide BOTH those facts. These facts are not contradictory, they are complementary.
Nothing kills my defense of a client's case more than a positive DNA hit. The courts are generous with funding top-level national DNA defense experts (I nabbed an author of the 2009 NAS report for example) but the only thing those are typically good for is affirming how fucked my client is. Even my clients, constituting a demographic notorious for fabulism, know they can't worm their way out of it. They'll start with "well maybe I randomly shook hands with the guy who actually did it and then..." and trail off into embarrassment at how fucking dumb they sound.
One problem though is that DNA is typically only collected after you are convicted. I had a case where detectives stalked this suspect with no criminal record in public over the course of several days, desperately hoping to collect any stray spit he might have left on random Gatorade bottles, only to find out he was uninvolved.
I used to work at the ACLU, and I feel my back rankle as I'm about to write this sentence but...maybe DNA should be collected for every newborn baby and immigrant and visitor in this country. It's a very simple cheek swab, and while I can understand the nebulous privacy concerns in the abstract, holy fuck would it be a boon for law enforcement's ability to solve crimes.
The only concern would be the government misusing it. Imagine we have some backsliding towards dictatorship, and the American government starts to look like China's. They could easily use that DNA to track down people like anonymous investigative journalists.
That's a valid concern, but a national DNA database is not what would augur an authoritarian government, and an authoritarian government wouldn't stop itself from creating a national DNA database. If that did happen, I think we'd have much bigger worries than a pre-existing DNA database.
I agree.
> I used to work at the ACLU, and I feel my back rankle as I'm about to write this sentence but...maybe DNA should be collected for every newborn baby and immigrant and visitor in this country. It's a very simple cheek swab, and while I can understand the nebulous privacy concerns in the abstract, holy fuck would it be a boon for law enforcement's ability to solve crimes.
Hasn't this to some extent already happened with the rise of 23andme and other voluntary DNA databases? While the killer may not have given over his DNA, it's quite possible a cousin, father, brother, etc has, which has allowed tracking down perpetrators in very old cold cases. If the government offered (say) $100 to people in exchange for a cheek swab, the voluntarily-given info would almost certainly provide more than enough data to locate almost any criminal.
Yes, it's clearly gotten easier, but it's not yet complete. A lot of DNA testing fails to return an immediate CODIS match, which means that follow-ups require specific investigations and search warrants. A voluntary incentive program would be a great start.
Fully agreed.
This post is intentionally misleading.
The author knows full well that his data set is out of date, groups all immigrants in with illegal immigrants, and does not included (nor can it include) unreported crimes - in particular illegal immigrant on illegal immigrant crime. This post also fails to account for leftoid manipulation of statistics at the reporting level, sanctuary city relaxing of regulations, and overall two tier justice enforcement.
Furthermore, while Haitians in Springfield or Venezualans in Aurora might be a small sample, that is only 2 towns out of MANY that are experiencing these issues. To simply dismiss this as too small of a sample is a bottom up data guy way of seeing the problem. From the top down view, ONE instance of this insanity is too many. The system is broken, the government (as currently operating) is the enemy of every citizen who understands that the only type of justice that matters is blind justice, but I repeat myself.
You can do amazing things with official data, without ever needing to account for the reality on the ground!
Why do we even care about crime with illegal perps and victims?
Because people are people and inherently valuable. To not care about the trials and suffering of immigrant children solely because they are illegal is to deny their humanity and consequently our own as well.
I agree with all of that; I was calling out the hypocrisy of Daddio .
?? Explain
You say those children should be kept out of the country for the benefit of American citizens, and that this is somehow for their own good? Either all men are created equal and hence get equal moral consideration, or not; you're trying to have it both ways.
“Conservatives are lying on immigrant crime” is a straw man. For conservatives to lie about immigrant crime, they would have to be referring to immigrant crime. They aren’t. What they are typically referring to is ILLEGAL immigrant crime which, by name, is 100%.
Let’s even ignore the fact that crossing our borders illegally is a crime all by itself, that they all committed. It takes all but 5 seconds to find many documentaries, new and old, on how dangerous illegal immigration is. If it doesn’t take you 5 seconds to find a documentary, surely you could simply ask any illegal immigrant about it. Lazy.
My half brother crossed the border from the Dominican Republic for $4k, despite my warnings, and he was abducted and almost died. He barely escaped. He left his wife and kids in his home country for a “better life”, ignoring the fact that he barely even speaks English. His wife immediately started cheating on him and he could only scrape by with underpaid jobs (basically slave labor) from the few employers that would even hire him.
Not even the “American Dream” democrats are trying to give these illegal immigrants is possible because all of us are barely surviving in our economy. Now with a giant surge of new, cheap, underpaid, slave labor, companies have even additional incentive to not charge higher wages. Being poor and destitute in America sucks just as much as living in any third world country, I would know and you should too. Just look with your eyes, stop looking with your pen and political bias. Lives are being ruined and are in turmoil from these god awful policies to excuse illegal immigration even for the illegal immigrants.
Let’s not even dive into how we cheat every legal immigrant. They spend years getting into this country properly and work too hard to be bypassed by human traffickers and criminals.
If you would like further details on my anecdote, I am happy to provide.
illegal, legal is literally just a meaningless government label. All the government has to do is register them as legal residents and now they're legal. Reagan even did that .
However, wide racial gaps between Hispanics and Whites in test scores, crime, income, welfare uptake, and IQ is not meaningless
You're absolutely correct. Im not criticizing the use of the term illegal because i want illegal immigrants here. Im criticizing it because I want to drastically reduce immigration as whole regardless of legal status. I think perhaps even a temporary pause on all immigration would be ideal. As a study was done that stated the sweet spot for American population size is actually some where around 150 million. We're well above that.
I think what you’re identifying is the precise issue. The idea of something being illegal has meaning. The fact that Reagan did what he did was wrong and set a bad precedent. Illegal means something and we need to keep people accountable.
Plural of "anecdote" is not "data". And documentaries are anecdotes.
R. Hanania understands it is completely disingenuous to use data from the 2000s like he does, so it is rich for him to claim that conservatives are lying. As if nothing has changed in the last 20 years politically for our nations Southern neighbors. We had the fall of Venezuela to communism, and the fall of Mexico to the narco terrorists.
Which implies that Venezuelan migrants are selected for being more rightist than average.
Eh most Venezuelans have the low IQ belief that Chavez was great, but Maduro ruined everything. They’ll probably bring their populist inclinations to America
Data to support this?
"In the end, I think we all know that most people who oppose immigration don’t really care what the numbers say. They dislike people who are different, and don’t want them around"
I don't think that's true. I don't have a problem with people who are better than me (often Jews, East Asians), just with those that are worse than me.
Culture is Downstream of genetics. At some point immigrants' descendants return to their "natural" behavior. Just look at how second and third generation immigrants behave in Germany
As a Jew who’s better than you, I recommend maybe you should consider accepting that you’re intellectually unfit to make sound judgements on these matters, and instead just defer to your genetic superiors.
You are not better than me. I am more on the right of the IQ distribution than you.
With guys like these responding to you, the immigration you oppose should be mainly of the elite kind. A resentful foreign elite is worse than a hard-working but criminally prone underclass.
I disagree. Intelligent people respond to incentives well, they can be controlled. Intelligence is a blessing. I'm sure Josh Rosenberg is more beneficial to society and himself than the average African. Josh may insult me but he's less likely to engage in pointless violence.
He might be less likely to be violent but he's more likely to enable, encourage or excuse violence from the underclass.
No you are not. And that’s ok! It’s not your fault that you’re stupid. You were born that way. We’ll be judged by the compassion we show for the least among us. That’s where you come in.
no wonder antisemitism is on the rise.
As alluded to in the post the American problem is rather different from the European problem.
This argument is so bad. It assumes that the only way to allow immigrants into our country is randomly, like dipping a spoon into a pot. Wrong. We have the right and obligation to try and screen criminals before they blend into society. If the government drops that obligation entirely, as it has done, then every crime committed by an unscreened immigrant represents an unforced error of the government.
And that doesn’t even account for the facts that 1. All illegal immigration IS crime and 2. We have NO IDEA how many people have crossed our border, so arguments on proportion are just guesses
"All illegal immigration IS crime" is a ludicrous argument. On the same basis, probably ALL Americans are criminals or at least guilty of misdemeanors. Not all "crimes" are equal. People who sheltered "enemies of the state" from Stalin's agents were criminals but not in a way that is remotely bad.
I don’t think I agree with that, although I admit that if I didn’t comprehend it, as you suggest, then of course I wouldn’t agree. My point is that the government has an obligation to screen immigrants in an attempt to protect you and me and to add value to our country. If they neglect that obligation, all crimes committed by the unscreened illegal immigrants are evidence of government failure. In the alternative world where immigrants are all screened, some crime would ensue, but it would 1. Probably be a lot less than current levels and 2. Exist in the context of a government that had met its obligation. I don’t see how baseline population levels of crime are relevant. Even if we were a horribly crime ridden society and bring in immigrants made us safer proportionally, the obligation to screen would still be in place and all additional crimes would be unforced errors if that obligation were not met.
Here is the argument that maybe you meant to make: "every crime committed by an unscreened immigrant _above the baseline population level_ represents an unforced error of the government". If you did in fact mean to make the argument as originally worded then I think you did not comprehend the post.
This post does not attempt to argue that illegal immigration is right, or that it is right and proper to let criminals immigrate, and the author's other writing generally supports using immigration to boost human capital, which involves picking and choosing who you let in. The argument is rather that it is dumb to try to ensure the incoming population commits literally zero crime, and that we should instead ensure they commit less crime than current native baseline, which the post argues already happens "naturally".
And having seen it from the other side, legal immigrants are in fact screened rather heavily, not just formally but also by populational factors like "who is actually determined and/or resourceful enough to try".
I can't understand this insatiable appetite for Somalis, Bangladeshis, Hondurans, and Malawis. Do you wish to live in an advanced space-faring nation - a large and serene Switzerland - or in a bumper to bumper twerking hybrid of Honduras and Bangladesh?
I cannot imagine a person more despised by both Democrats and Republicans than a pro-immigrant race realist.
1) Adjusting for the age and sex of immigrants makes no sense. If immigrants are disportionately male and young, and that group commits more crime, OF COURSE that's relevant to the question of whether immigration affects crime. I appreciate that you tried to address this counterclaim, but this is extremely weak.
2) even more importantly, the critical question for the American voter is not "do immigrants commit more crime?" but rather "Will I or my loved ones be more likely to become a victim of crime because of immigration". This means it makes no sense to speak in terms of crimes in total.
What matters is the number of crimes committed against *strangers* or their property. So right from the start you need to ignore things like nonviolent drug crimes, white collar crime, not paying child support, parental neglect, parole violations that stem from the above, etc. Even things like domestic violence are irrelevant for this discussion. All that matters are crimes involving assault, robbery, homicide, theft, vandalism, and so forth by parties unknown to the victim. So the question is, do immigrants, and especially illegal immigrants, commit more of these types of crimes?
And more specifically, for the individual, "do I as a male/female middle-class/poor/rich, white/black/Asian person face a greater risk from immigrants than another American citizen randomly chosen adjusted for the demographics in the area where I live? For example, if I'm a 20 year old white woman in a previously safe neighborhood, does it matter for my safety that the state is subsidizing the housing of a dozen 25 year old Venezuelan males two blocks from my home? It DOES NOT MATTER, from the perspective of that white woman, that Han Chinese immigrants entering black neighborhoods somewhere else in the country cancels out any greater risk she personally incurs once the statistics are aggregated.
“Voters are in the end irrational and want mutually contradictory things. The proper role of Elite Human Capital is to decide which goals are humane and noble, and which attitudes and preferences should be ignored or even suppressed.”
Aka, elected oligarchy.
Exactly. That's a _good_ thing, to not become Athens expelling Themistocles.
Rejecting alien phenotypes is not Athens expelling Themistocles. I’m talking about property rights. Once upon a time there were racial covenants and freedom of association but “noble” and “humane” “EHC” abolished those liberties because they “know better” than the “irrational” voters (of course, any preference or view one doesn’t like can be labeled irrational; it’s just a cheap version of “false consciousness”). As taxpayers, natives have de facto ownership of the streets, roads, etc. but libertarian open borders types suddenly become socialists when it comes to the “irrational” property owners (aka the voters) exercising their property rights. When it comes to “democracy”, they prefer the attitude of Bertolt Brecht, who famously said the East German communists should “elect a new people”. There is also the amusing irony of denigrating the preferences and alleged stupidity of white voters while bleeding for immigrants (much in the same way liberals bleed for blacks), many of whom are even dumber than the natives.
Just like Norman Podhoretz once did, Bryan Caplan openly calls for miscegenation to eliminate racial/ethnic antagonism. But wouldn’t that solve the problem of the Jews? RH hypocritically defends “ethnocentrism for me but not for thee” when it comes to the Jews, but who cares if Jews disappear as long as it’s done via peaceful miscegenation? Does that only apply to white nations?
The example was for the more general point of "elected oligarchy" being preferable to "true democracy".
As for the content of your (strongly inflammatory, but I'll try to steelman) comment:
1. You can both bleed for someone and consider their preferences dumb and wrong. This is what consistently happens with people steering people - and should happen if empathy is a good thing because people's preferences, when taken in aggregate (and democracy takes them in aggregate), are _always_ so simplified as to be dumb, wrong, and contradictory.
2. The "I paid taxes for things government does, therefore I own (a share in) everything government creates" is a falsehood promulgated across political spectra, which doesn't make it less of a falsehood. You pay government for some services, this doesn't make you the owner of things it creates, even if it uses said things for providing that service. An apt analogy is paying a butcher, which doesn't make you the owner of the knife they use to cut meat.
3. Regarding "miscegenation" - assortative mating of some kind will happen unless some highly coercive methodology to enforce otherwise would be employed, methodology neither Caplan nor Hanania, both people much more libertarian than I am, would recommend. But prohibiting miscegenation would be a kludgy, ineffective, and morally wrong proxy for assortative mating. Ethnic groups delendae sunt.
Re: #2: Under libertarianism the streets would be fully privatized; in the absence of privatization, the natives have de facto ownership. This is not like remotely like consumers owning the knives in a privately owned butcher shop simply because they are used to cut the meat. A more apt analogy to government controlled streets would be if the butcher shops were state-funded enterprises. In that case, the tax-payers would indeed own the knives.
They wouldn't. State is not in the ownership of taxpayers, government is a service-providing organization.
The state is negative sum and should be eliminated. But the streets could be privately owned before that happens. If you are against collective ownership, then you should be against state “ownership” (control) of the the streets. Also, just because the streets are controlled by the government doesn’t mean that they have any clue what the optimum number of immigrants are, i.e., the number of immigrants that would be invited if the streets were privately owned. In the absence of privatization, there is only de facto ownership by the natives. “Nobility” and “humaneness” (neoliberal wordcel talk) doesn’t override this de facto ownership anymore than “humaneness” requires that a private employer must hire a Hispanic or that you are required to invite a Hispanic into your home. If the streets were privately owned but, say, the parks were government controlled, would that mean that we must have open borders? Obviously not. But when we have road socialism, it means exactly that to the open borders libertarians.
Voters do not have property rights. There is no such thing as a collective property right. As an actual Libertarian, I support eliminating anti-discrimination laws except as applied to governments, eliminating most of the welfare state, and increased legal immigration. You can argue about the order in which those should happen, but the overall programme is coherent.
If you are an “actual libertarian”, you should support privatization of the streets and total elimination of the welfare state. In the absence of full privatization, the natives have de facto ownership of the streets. Collective ownership is not desirable but it is imposed by government control.
“Yet this perspective takes an unusually long-term view, and if you are really that worried about crime, trying to engineer the perfect demographic composition of the population a generation from now is probably not the best thing you could be doing with your time. “
Why is worrying about a medium-term trend to higher crime rates nationally (due to second, third gen etc hispanics africans) a weird concern? And then your solution is that we could have a bukele, who is an extreme anomaly.
It is prudent to take into consideration medium to long teem effects in crime and welfare that the children of migrants will have.
It is not prudent to fling open the borders hoping that we can implement keyhole solutions that are politically infeasible now and will only become moreso with changing demographic composition
“It’s a very weird objection, and it makes me wonder what is going on when people make this argument. “
Again, I think you are being willfully obtuse.
Thankfully, black crime is generally geographically isolated.
If you admit an immigrant group to a city, and that group is more criminal than native whites, but less criminal than blacks that makes a city—and increasing portions of it—more unlivable, despite the (first gen) immigrant group being significantly better than blacks
I agree that Trump's rhetoric on the issue is completely unhelpful and out of bounds. However, I think you are completely wrong to dismiss the underlying issue out of hand.
"Conservatives got upset at the ABC moderators fact checking Trump on his claim that the crime rate was up, but the FBI statistics were just released, and the media was right while Trump was wrong"
Actually, there is good reason to think that Trump was right.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/contrary-to-media-myth-u-s-urban-crime-rates-are-up-violence-cities-9ce714f6
"The nation’s largest crime survey says otherwise: Crime rates haven’t been falling, and urban crime is far worse than it was in the pre-George Floyd era. The new findings were released this month by the National Crime Victimization Survey. Run by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and administered by the Census Bureau, the NCVS dates to the Nixon administration and is one of the largest federal surveys on any topic. It asks some 230,000 U.S. residents annually whether they’ve been the victims of crimes. It then asks about the nature of the crime, whether it was reported to the police, the demographics of the perpetrator and other particulars."
Furthermore, the data you provide is almost all out of date. The very little data that you have that actually differentiates between legal immigrants and illegal immigrants covers Texas only.
The fact of the matter is, there is good reason to not want a system where pretty much anyone can crash the border, make a bogus asylum claim, and then never get deported unless they get convicted of a felony.
The whole debate is about whether the crime rate is up under Biden because we’re discussing this in the context of an election season where Trump is running on that idea. This article says that crime is up from 2019 to 2023, when the increase is pretty much completely due to the last two years that Trump was in office. Trump and conservatives are just lying with regards to the main thing they’re running on. If they want to say crime is up since Trump’s term and hasn’t gone back to what it was yet, that’s different.
No, what the article says is that the government's data fails a cross-check. Unless you have some compelling reason to believe official statistics have experienced a massive increase in reliability recently, or that survey takers have become systematically less reliable for some reason, then what it implies is that the data quality is _still_ poor and that therefore making contradictory claims about it is fair game.
If people don't like Trump making "wrong" statements about the output of government counting processes for immigration, crime or voting then you need to ensure the data quality is beyond reproach. Otherwise it just turns into more of the flea-brained "elitism" of the past years in which garbage-tier government data is used to prove people "wrong" and then we all discover a few years later that actually it was everyone who believed the government who was wrong. But such people never update!
Well done. I'm amazed at how skeptical the elites are when people are screaming about an issue as if they are just pulling it out of thin air. This whole article and many pieces from Richard seem to bend over backwards to avoid admitting the politically unpopular thing.
With an anchor baby, felons can stay too.
Ron Unz makes a similar argument. Hispanic immigrants ethnically cleansed African-Americans from East Palo Alto, which was once the "murder capital of the U.S." and everyone in Palo Alto is very happy about that. https://www.unz.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Unz-UR-RaceCrime.pdf
The mere existence of non-trivial levels of immigrant crime is evidence of a lack of sovereign control of the border, which is itself a problem. America should have a choice over who it lets into the country, and the correct number of criminals should be zero. And criminals should definitely be deported. The fact that there is a non-trivial number of immigrant criminals; and they aren't immediately deported as soon as they are arrested; and nobody seems to be able to do anything about this, is in itself a problem.
"435,719 convicted criminal immigrants were on ICE's non-detained docket....More than 13,000 immigrants convicted of homicide — either in the United States or abroad — are living outside of Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention" https://www.nbcnews.com/investigations/13000-immigrants-convicted-homicide-living-freely-us-ice-data-rcna17312
The basic premise is that an open southern border is attracting a population of illegal immigrants that are more criminally active than most Americans, but perhaps not as criminally active as blacks (who are have horrific rates of criminal offending).
I don't think anything you've said in this article refutes that.
To contrast that with the left narrative on police brutality/mass incarceration which conveniently left out the horrific stats on black criminality. Those specific facts about black crime refuted the entire narrative upon which cities were burned.
Way more truth to Trump's narrative than the nonsense we witnessed in 2020...not the same.