What the Media Won’t Tell You About Illegal Immigration and Criminal Activity

[www.heritage.org]

KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. President Trump announced that the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office would help victims of crimes committed by aliens.

2. The first report from 2005 (GAO-05-337R) found that criminal aliens (both legal and illegal) make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners.

3. Every crime committed by an illegal alien is one that wouldn't have occurred if that alien wasn’t in the United States in the first place.

President Trump announced in his speech to Congress that the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement office (VOICE) would help victims of crimes committed by aliens. There’s also a provision in his Jan. 25 executive order directing DHS to provide “a comprehensive list of criminal actions committed by aliens” on a weekly basis. Yet the Left and the media again made the claim that aliens commit less crime than native-born citizens and that the only “cruel” purpose of these actions is to “tag immigrants as criminals.”

According to a recent Associated Press article, “multiple studies have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born U.S. citizens.” But the issue isn’t non-citizens who are in this country legally, and who must abide by the law to avoid having their visas revoked or their application for citizenship refused. The real issue is the crimes committed by illegal aliens. And in that context, the claim is quite misleading, because the “multiple studies” on crimes committed by “immigrants” — including a 2014 study by a professor from the University of Massachusetts, which is the only one cited in the article — combine the crime rates of both citizens and non-citizens, legal and illegal.

That isn’t the only problem with the study. Instead of using official crime data, it uses “self-reported criminal offending and country of birth information.” For obvious reasons, there is little incentive for anyone, let alone criminal aliens, to self-report “delinquent and criminal involvement.” When it comes to self-reporting criminal activity, some respondents will, no doubt, exaggerate. Others will flat out lie. Furthermore, many respondents will likely not disclose if they are a non-citizen out of fear of discovery and deportation.

These claims overlook disturbing actual data on crimes committed by criminal aliens. For example, the Government Accountability Office released two unsettling reports in 2005 on criminal aliens who are in prison for committing crimes in the United States, and issued an updated report in 2011.

The first report (GAO-05-337R) found that criminal aliens (both legal and illegal) make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners. Yet according to the Center for Immigration Studies, non-citizens are only about nine percent of the nation’s adult population. Thus, judging by the numbers in federal prisons alone, non-citizens commit federal crimes at three times the rate of citizens.

The findings in the second report (GAO-05-646R) are even more disturbing. This report looked at the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens that “entered the country illegally and were still illegally in the country at the time of their incarceration in federal or state prison or local jail during fiscal year 2003.” Those 55,322 illegal aliens had been arrested 459,614 times, an average of 8.3 arrests per illegal alien, and had committed almost 700,000 criminal offenses, an average of roughly 12.7 offenses per illegal alien.

Out of all of the arrests, 12 percent were for violent crimes such as murder, robbery, assault and sex-related crimes; 15 percent were for burglary, larceny, theft and property damage; 24 percent were for drug offenses; and the remaining offenses were for DUI, fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, weapons, immigration, and obstruction of justice.

The 2011 GAO report wasn’t much different. It looked at 251,000 criminal aliens in federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Those aliens were arrested nearly 1.7 million times for close to three million criminal offenses. Sixty-eight percent of those in federal prison and 66 percent of those in state prisons were from Mexico. Their offenses ranged from homicide and kidnapping to drugs, burglary, and larceny.

Once again, these statistics are not fully representative of crimes committed by illegal aliens: This report only reflects the criminal histories of aliens who were in prison. If there were a way to include all crimes committed by criminal aliens, the numbers would likely be higher because prosecutors often will agree to drop criminal charges against an illegal alien if they are assured that immigration authorities will deport the alien.

The GAO reports also highlight another important flaw in the study referenced by the Associated Press. It uses survey data from a nationally representative sample of people living in the United States. Thus, the study does not take into account some potentially key factors highlighted in the GAO reports: that criminal aliens from Mexico disproportionately make up incarcerations (GAO-05-337R) and that most arrests are made in the three border states of California, Texas, and Arizona (GAO-05-646R and GAO-11-187).

Every crime committed by an illegal alien is one that would not have occurred if that alien wasn’t in the United States in the first place.

One 2001 study that does take country of origin and geographic concentration factors into account found that Mexican immigrants “commit between 3.5 and 5 times as many crimes as the average native.” It also pointed out the large concentration of Mexican immigrants in the Southwest, which indicates that a nation-wide sample may not represent what is happening in states with a large concentration of criminal aliens.

Although there are no perfect measures of crimes committed by criminal aliens, it has certainly not been substantiated, as the Associated Press article states, that illegal aliens commit crimes at a lesser rate than either native-born or naturalized American citizens. In fact, existing data seems to show that the opposite is likely true.

But we do know one thing for sure. Every crime committed by an illegal alien is one that would not have occurred if that alien wasn’t in the United States in the first place. That includes the hundreds of thousands of crimes committed by the 55,322 illegal aliens in the GAO study who victimized countless numbers of Americans.

So despite the criticism from the ACLU and others, requiring the federal government to keep track of and regularly report on the victimization of Americans by illegal aliens is not only a good idea, it is something that the American people should demand.

Hans A. von Spakovsky
Election Law Reform Initiative and Senior Legal Fellow

This piece originally appeared in Conservative Review



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/24/2019 11:25PM by Jennifer.

Heritage Foundation My Dear? Really now, you think it sets record straight?

Ha Ha HAAAAAAAA you ole spiner keep on kluken your day is coming.



Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank. Its stated mission is to formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of "free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense."Jan 24, 2019

More FACTS; More TRUTH -

Great Article by Sheryl Attkisson -

One in five US prison inmates is a 'criminal alien'

[thehill.com]

New, little-reported statistics seem to prove two competing points in the illegal immigration debate.

First, it’s true that most illegal immigrants are not imprisoned for committing additional crimes (beyond coming here illegally) in the United States. One might fairly deduce that most are otherwise law-abiding. But “criminal aliens” — those who engage in other criminal acts — do make up a disproportionate number of inmates in our prisons and jails. Seeing the numbers, one might fairly deduce that they commit serious crimes at a significantly higher rate than those in the U.S. legally.

Here’s how the latest numbers break down.

The U.S. population is around 328 million. It’s estimated that about 11 million — or one in 30 — are illegal immigrants. Yet criminal aliens account for more than one in five federal prison inmates. Even assuming a pretty radical margin of error for the sake of argument, that would still mean illegal immigrants are drastically over-represented among the criminal population.

And the actual picture may be worse, since the government says it has no way to be notified of all imprisoned illegal immigrants. So, instead, it counts a subset of them that it learns about through identifiers such as an FBI number.

The latest information is included in a recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO). The summary by the leader of GAO’s Homeland Security and Justice team, Gretta Goodwin, seems oddly written to try to put a positive spin on the grim findings. It highlights this figure: From 2011 through 2016, the criminal alien proportion of the total estimated federal inmate population generally decreased, from about 25 percent to 21 percent.

Stop there and you might think we’re on a good path. But dig into the actual report and footnotes — and it’s difficult to sugarcoat the findings.

For starters, 91 percent of federal criminal aliens were citizens of Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Colombia or Guatemala.

There were more than 730,000 criminal aliens in U.S. or state prisons and local jails during the period measured. They accounted for 4.9 million arrests for 7.5 million offenses. (The numbers, according to the GAO: 197,000 criminal aliens in federal prisons, arrested 1.4 million times for 2 million offenses, between 2011 and 2016; 533,000 in state or local facilities between 2010 and 2015, representing 3.5 million arrests for 5.5 million offenses.)

The arrests include allegations of more than 1 million drug crimes, a half-million assaults, 133,800 sex offenses and 24,200 kidnappings. Even more serious, the imprisoned illegal immigrants, over a five-year period, had been arrested for 33,300 homicide-related offenses and 1,500 terrorism-related crimes.

In terms of cost, federal taxpayers shelled out more than $15 billion during the period studied — or $2.5 billion a year — to keep criminal aliens behind bars in federal, state and local facilities.

Many are repeat offenders. Of about 146,500 criminal aliens who finished a federal prison term, about one in six — around 24,800 — already had been imprisoned again at least once.

Why hasn’t this made headlines? It could be the way the GAO presented the results as a positive improvement. It took me some time to sort through and analyze what was really being reported. In addition, though they squabble publicly, some among both major political parties have a vested interest in keeping the status quo. Even when a single party has held both houses of Congress and the presidency, they haven’t really changed much to address illegal immigration one way or another.

If politicians ever truly get serious about reforming our immigration system — whether it’s offering legal status to illegal immigrants and allowing more to come into the United States, or tightening the borders and enforcing existing laws to deport those who technically aren’t allowed — it would seem either process should start with an honest look at the stats.

Sharyl Attkisson (@SharylAttkisson) is an Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist, author of The New York Times bestsellers “The Smear” and “Stonewalled,” and host of Sinclair’s Sunday TV program, “Full Measure.”

Also -

* Government data on the crime rates of immigrants is often unclear, because:

governments sometimes don’t distinguish between legal and illegal immigrants in their crime statistics, even though all legal immigrants must pass full criminal background checks, while illegal immigrants do not.[740] [741] [742] [743]

certain state and local governments have enacted sanctuary policies that prohibit law enforcement from examining or recording the immigration status of arrestees.[744] [745] [746]

federal, state, and local governments differ in how they define and record the immigration status of people who pass through the criminal justice system.[747]
illegal immigrant crime victims may not report crimes committed against them due to fear of deportation.[748]

millions of immigrants use fraudulent Social Security numbers, fake birth certificates, or other forms of identity fraud to mask their immigration status.[749] [750] [751]

surveys are dependent upon respondent honesty, and certain groups of immigrants often misrepresent themselves as citizens in surveys.[752]

the number of immigrants in the U.S. is uncertain.

[www.businessinsider.com]...

22 tháng 8, 2018 – is in the US illegally. But despite widespread claims, data shows unauthorized immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens.

Two charts demolish the notion that immigrants here illegally ...
[www.washingtonpost.com]

Reports find that immigrants commit less crime than US-born citizens ...
[thehill.com]

Do you believe that illegal immigrants commit more violent crime ...
[answers.yahoo.com]

17 tháng 4, 2008 – Studies and data going back more than a century in the United States consistently show that immigrants - legal and illegal - are far less likely to commit ... Do you believe that illegal immigrants commit more violent crime then US Citizens?

Do immigrants commit more crimes than Americans? ICE director ...

[www.businessinsider.com]...

28 tháng 6, 2017 – The statement contrasts with Trump's frequent insistence that undocumented immigrants present a public safety threat to Americans.

How big a problem is crime committed by immigrants? - CBS News
[www.cbsnews.com]

27 tháng 1, 2017 – President Trump wants to create a list of crime committed by "aliens," but some studies show immigrants commit crime at lower rates than native-born citizens ... the nation’s more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies

MOSTLY TRUE: Undocumented immigrants less likely to commit crimes ...
[www.politifact.com]-...

Contrary to Trump’s Claims, Immigrants Are Less Likely to Commit ...

[www.nytimes.com]

News
27 tháng 1, 2017 – Experts say the available evidence does not support the idea that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate share of crime.

Illegal immigration to the United States and crime - Wikipedia
[en.wikipedia.org]

According to many studies, undocumented immigrants in the United States are less likely to commit crime than native-born citizens and have no impact on violent crime rates. ... immigrants (including illegal immigrants)

Trump isn’t telling the truth about illegal immigrants and crime ...
[www.washingtonpost.com]-...

Does Illegal Immigration Increase Crime and Welfare Dependency ...
[www.dailywire.com]...

2 tháng 9, 2016 – In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s speech on illegal ... There is no empirical evidence that immigrants, legal or illegal, are driving crime

Again, as I posted previously - most of the articles you reference - half your links don't work - state "IMMIGRANTS" not "ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS". That's the work-around - lumping all Legal Immigrants and Illegal Immigrants together and calling them "Immigrants".

Is that too hard to understand.

White Americans peg 'illegal' immigrants by country of origin ...
[www.futurity.org]

6 tháng 4, 2019 – The findings suggest that the mere perception of illegal ... whereas Republicans are more likely to suspect that receiving ... In fact, other research finds that undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

The GAO recently analyzed the rap sheets of more than 55,000 illegal aliens incarcerated in federal, state, and local facilities during 2003.

It found:

The average criminal alien was arrested for 13 prior offenses.

12 percent were for murder, robbery, assault, and sexually related
crimes.

Only 21 percent were immigration offenses; the rest were felonies.

Approximately 27 percent of all prisoners
in Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities
are criminal aliens. The majority (63 percent)
are citizens of Mexico. Other major nationalities
include Colombia and the Dominican Republic
7 percent each; Jamaica 4 percent; Cuba 3 percent;
El Salvador 2 percent; and Honduras, Haiti, and
Guatemala 1 percent each.

The remaining 11 percent are from 164 different
countries.

A shortage of available prison capacity has forced federal authorities
to release criminal aliens prematurely. Nationally an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 illegal immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes still walk the streets.

Fact Check: No Evidence Undocumented Immigrants Commit More Crimes

[www.nbcnews.com]...

28 tháng 6, 2017 – The Trump administration on Wednesday was all about crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. There’s one catch: There's no evidence that undocumented immigrants commit more crime.

Data show undocumented immigrants are less likely to commit crime ...

[www.thisisinsider.com]

U.S.-born citizens commit more crime than immigrants, new studies ...
[www.aol.com]...

My Dear even your beloved FOX MOO's says so

Illegal immigrant crime wave? Evidence is hard to find | Fox News
[www.foxnews.com]

looking like only you and RT Russia Today on same page My Dear!

Quote
riverhousebill
Does Illegal Immigration Increase Crime and Welfare Dependency ...
[www.dailywire.com]...

2 tháng 9, 2016 – In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s speech on illegal ... There is no empirical evidence that immigrants, legal or illegal, are driving crime

Thanks for posting that excellent article by Ben Shapiro. Here's the link that works -

[www.dailywire.com]

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s speech on illegal immigration, many fact-checkers and commentators claimed that Trump’s concerns about criminal activities and welfare dependency by illegal immigrants were utterly unfounded. Here, for example, was the always-excellent Jason Riley of The Wall Street Journal:

Riley’s words reflect the common wisdom in the punditocracy. According to Pew Research, “The crime rate among first-generation immigrants – those who came to this country from somewhere else – is significantly lower than the overall crime rate and that of the second generation.”

But it may not be quite so simple.

David Frum of The Atlantic, no hard-core immigration opponent, wrote in 2015 that as of 2011, there were 25,000 illegal immigrants serving murder sentences, and nearly 3 million offenses committed by illegal immigrants between 2003 and 2009, including 70,000 sex crimes and hundreds of thousands of other violent crimes. “After years of welcome decline,” Frum pointed out, “crime rates are rising in immigration hubs including Houston, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and San Diego.” Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo reported in 2015 that between “2008 and 2014, 40% of all murder convictions in Florida were criminal aliens. In New York it was 34% and Arizona 17.8%. During those years, criminal aliens accounted for 38% of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, while illegal aliens constitute only 5.6% of the total population in those states.”

Why the disconnect regarding immigrant crime estimates? There are a few issues with measuring immigrant crime, particularly illegal immigrant crime. First, statistical studies often use prison statistics, and as Frum points out, “Many of the people in prison today were sent there at a time when the foreign-born population was smaller and crime rates higher.” So if a smaller proportion of inmates are immigrants, that could reflect more on old crime rates than it does on immigrant crime rates. Second, lumping together all natives against all immigrants does a disservice to both natives and immigrants – there are sub-groups within both “natives” and “immigrants” with widely varying crime rates. Domestically born Jews, for example, have a far lower crime rate than domestically born blacks; Asian immigrants have a far lower crime rate than Mexican immigrants; Chinese immigrants have a far lower crime rate than Vietnamese immigrants. As Frum says: “Among those native-born groups with higher rates of crime: children of immigrants, who offend at rates substantially higher than their parents.”

Overall, statistics on immigrant crime are quite poorly kept. That’s because so many crime statistics depend on the Census, which undersamples illegal immigrant populations. Alex Nowrasteh of CATO Institute, an ardent advocate of open immigration, admits, “studies of immigrant criminality based on Census data alone could fail to give the full picture…the government has done a very poor job of gathering data on the nationality and immigration status of prisoners – even when it has tried.”

In his comprehensive tome The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America, Professor Barry Latzer sums up his findings: “assertions that immigration invariably reduces crime in the host country are not borne out by the evidence. Such contentions have no more support than the converse claim that immigrants inevitably raise crime rates.” Latzer concludes that the crime rate of the incoming community and the crime rate of the absorbing community make all the difference. In communities like Los Angeles and Miami, high levels of immigration had undoubtedly raised the crime rates.

How about illegal immigration harming the economy via increased dependency on government largesse?

Low-skill legal immigration, and illegal immigration – because illegal immigrants tend to be low-skill, low-wage workers – provide a serious drain on America’s public resources. Nearly one quarter of all immigrant households in the United States are led by a non-high school graduate, and the average immigrant household has significantly more children than the average citizen household.

While groups like Partnership for a New Economy provide friendly statistics on the economic benefits of immigration, they don’t typically investigate the cost of illegal immigration. Those costs are substantial and burdensome. The vast majority of immigrants, both legal and illegal, come to America looking for a job, but the security provided by America’s safety net doesn’t go untouched. Legal immigrants are eligible for the vast majority of welfare programs; illegal immigrants typically rely on food programs and Medicaid via their kids. That doesn’t count the cost of education, either, which has skyrocketed in areas with a significant influx of immigrants.

The anti-illegal immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform estimates that the cost of “education, health care, law enforcement, and social and government services to illegal aliens and their dependents costs Californians $25.3 billion per year.” That includes $14.4 billion spent on K-12 education, as well as another $4.4 billion on criminal justice system costs. As of 2007, 18 percent of households in LA County were on welfare – but 41 percent of immigrant households and 48 percent of households headed by an illegal immigrant were on a welfare program.

Such costs aren’t relegated to California. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, nearly half of all households headed by legal immigrants used at least one welfare program in 2012, compared with 30 percent of native-headed households; that imbalance is particularly stark with regard to food programs (36 percent to 22 percent) and Medicaid (39 percent to 23 percent). Legalizing illegal immigrants would make those immigrants eligible for such programs, widening that imbalance. Immigrants and their children were responsible for “42 percent of the growth in Medicaid enrollment from 2011 to 2013,” largely because immigrants are disproportionately poor and uninsured. Immigrant families benefit disproportionately from expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare as well.

In terms of absolute cost, CIS estimates that the average immigrant household takes $6,234 per year in federal welfare benefits, far higher than the native-born population’s $4,431 per household. Furthermore, “The average immigrant household consumes 33 percent more cash welfare, 57 percent more food assistance, and 44 percent more Medicaid dollars than the average native household.” Not all immigrants take the same amount of welfare, of course – households led by immigrants from Central America and Mexico average $8,251 in welfare benefits.

So no, it isn’t true that there are no economic or criminal costs to illegal immigration. At the very best, the case is mixed – and if the case is mixed, that’s a problem for advocates for illegal immigration, since a country has a right to usher in only those who benefit it.