What is the crime rate of illegals coming into the United States? Or perhaps they don't count those because they are set free by Liberals no matter what the crime.
Conflicting Research
There is, however, one study that backs the president’s claim. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, looked at data on prisoners in Arizona state prison between the beginning of 1985 and June 2017 and
concluded that “undocumented immigrants are at least 146% more likely to be convicted of crime than other Arizonans.” They also tend to commit more serious crimes, and have significantly higher rates for such crimes as murder, manslaughter, sexual assault and armed robbery, Lott concluded, and are more likely to be gang members. Conversely, Lott found that
legal immigrants “were extremely law-abiding,” committing crimes at a lower rate than native-born residents.
Although Lott says his study is unique because “for the first time” he was able to differentiate between immigrants in the country legally and illegally, that claim was contested by Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute. Nowrasteh
argues Lott’s study contains a “fatal flaw” in its assumption that it was able to “identify illegal immigrants” from the data. The
Washington Post Fact Checker did a deep dive on the arguments and counterarguments about the validity of the study.
“The overall picture of immigrants and crime remains confused due to a lack of good data and contrary information,” Steven Camarota and Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates low immigration,
wrote in 2009.
Camarota told us it is somewhat irrelevant whether immigrants in the country illegally commit crimes at a slightly higher or lower rate than native-born Americans.
“Does releasing illegal immigrants allow them to commit crimes they otherwise would not have committed, yes it does,” Camarota told us in an email. “Do the crimes committed by released illegal immigrants number in the thousands, yes they do.”
But we are looking at a claim from Trump about the comparison of crime rates of immigrants in the country illegally and native-born residents.
“If you are asking if illegals commit crimes out of their proportion of the population as I said maybe, maybe not,” Camarota said. “Data is limited and it depends on who you compare them to.”
As we said, there aren’t readily available nationwide crime statistics broken down by immigration status. But the available research that estimates the relationship between illegal immigration and crime generally shows an association with lower crime rates. The impetus is on the president to provide evidence of his claim, and Trump instead simply cited statistics on violent crime committed by all non citizens without attempting to compare those figures to crimes committed by native-born residents.
