Advocates of a borderless United States – those who will do or say anything to maintain unimpeded illegal mass migration – demand that Americans deny an especially resonant consequence of that migration: illegal border crossers who murder, kill with drunk driving, rape, rob and beat their hosts.
In their arguments for continued releases into the country of illegal border-crossing strangers, libertarian and progressive activists always point to “studies” that compare crime rates for illegal aliens to those for U.S. citizens and conclude that Americans commit as much or more crime than the illegal immigrants. Media writers and pundits on the open-borders side parrot the “studies” to argue against detention and deportation proposals that would reduce illegal alien crime on the grounds that the main danger to address are U.S. citizen criminals and, while you’re at it, let the border flows continue unimpeded since that population is less worrisome.
“No, Illegal Migrants Aren’t Fueling a Crime Wave”, reads the June 26 headline of a Bloomberg column by Justin Fox in a typical argument against illegal immigration enforcement.
“Migrant Crime Wave Not Supported by Data, Despite High-Profile Cases”, the headline of a February 15 New York Times report states, in another attempt to blunt recent demands for border enforcement.
“Ironically, studies indicate that immigrants commit less crime than U.S.-born individuals, and advocates have been pushing for less detention for years”, wrote Michael Lukens, Executive Director at the Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, in a February 20 letter to the editor in The Washington Post. “Instead of alarmist tactics, ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] should be looking at the devastating impacts of detention and releasing immigrants because it is the right thing to do.”
Complicit in this misdirection are some Republicans and border hawks who frequently engage the citizens-versus-illegal-aliens comparison in crime rates, trying to challenge, counter, and undermine the crime comparison studies.
What opponents of mass illegal migration must realize, especially now that illegal-alien crime is figuring prominently in the presidential campaign, is that this door opened by their adversaries leads up a fake stairwell.
The citizen-illegal alien comparison is invalid from the start. A different approach is necessary.
Invalid Apples-to-Rocks Comparison. The notion that policy thinkers and media pundits must compare the measured crime rates of citizens and illegal aliens has no foundation in academic science because the two compared groups are not similar enough.
Here is why: Illegal immigrants, unlike American citizens, are uniquely subject to an elaborate deportation and detention apparatus that Congress built to block and remove them from the country, in part so that they are not present to commit crimes. The same apparatus, of course, cannot touch American citizens who will commit crimes.
To state what should be obvious: Illegal aliens blocked at the border or who are quickly removed from the country cannot inflict harm on Americans because they are not present. That means every single crime committed by an illegally present immigrant was preventable and should never have happened, whereas the Department of Homeland Security detention and removal machine cannot prevent a single crime by an American citizen.
All crimes committed by illegal aliens represent an unnecessary and preventable burden on American society and its criminal justice system.
These differences between the two groups mean that comparing their crime rates isn’t even apples-to-oranges, but apples-to-rocks, and invalid from the start.
The libertarians and progressives who created and purveyed the citizen-versus-illegals crime-rate comparison debate should be called out for their campaign of misdirection. It has helped neutralize the deserved political backlash against these 100 percent unnecessary extra crimes and blunted political momentum for policy remedies that would reduce the illegal immigration that caused them. The mass illegal immigration continues while those who either favor or disfavor illegal immigration wage their battles over the invalid question of relative crime rates.
A different approach is long overdue.
The Comparison Stands Discredited Anyway, But…. Immigration hawks have done much to discredit the studies that conclude American citizens are more prone to crime than illegal aliens. For instance, the Center for Immigration Studies has found that the activist-academics who favor unimpeded illegal immigration have misused data to undercount criminal alien crime. (See Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Crime and Continued Misuse of Texas Crime Data.)
But as the current 2024 presidential campaign shows, efforts to engage the comparison debate have done little to suppress its continued impact of blunting momentum for policy change. Mass media outlets still default to the original ruse at a time when a new approach to this discussion is most needed to stop the mass border incursions that are fueling the avoidable increase in crime caused by illegal immigration.
Even though they have done a laudable job at discrediting the original studies, border enforcement advocates would do better now to disengage from further attempts and instead call out the comparison studies as the intellectual sham they are, on grounds that the two groups are too different to be compared. They should parry every citation of the studies and re-direct to the correct policy discussion, which is the extent to which current American leadership uses (or refuses to use) existing border enforcement law to block, detain, and deport. They should argue that all illegal alien crime is an addition to America’s crime problem, no matter what the relative crime rates are, and that American-citizen crime rates are irrelevant to the discussion of a solution to that.
They should argue that blocking, detaining, and deporting illegal aliens are the main levers to prevent illegal-alien crime in the United States, and that not using those tools enables more such crime. No one on either side of this policy issue should ever again engage in the sham comparison of crime rates, and border hawks should parry and thrust elsewhere.
Graves That Need Never Have Been Dug. Having said all this, the comparison “studies” sham was useful in one important regard – it surfaced data that sheds light on the magnitude of preventable illegal immigrant crime. The data comes from the only U.S. state that has consistently tracked its illegal immigrant crime for years: Texas.
Border enforcement advocates should use this rare data set, not to compare the incomparable but, rather, to emphasize the entirely preventable addition to overall U.S. crime. The Texas data should be used to emphasize the need for the United States to protect its citizens by exercising existing deportation and detention requirements embodied in the Immigration and Nationality Act.
America may never know the full extent of alien crime resulting from the Biden border crisis, because most local, state, and federal agencies will not log the immigration status of criminals. But the Texas Department of Public Safety tracks the immigration status of suspects who are booked into local jails through a program that submits fingerprints to the FBI for criminal history and warrant checks, and to DHS. The agencies return immigration status information on those whose fingerprints were already on file (which is not all of them).
From the resulting Texas statistics, we catch a partial glimpse of the vaster sea of preventable carnage nationwide, of murder, rape, child abuse, burglary, felony theft, drug trafficking, alien smuggling, and drunk driving manslaughter.
Between June 1, 2011, and June 30, 2024, these 437,000 criminal aliens (308,000 classified as illegal) were charged with more than 533,000 criminal offenses that should never have happened. Those included 997 homicide charges (resulting in 498 convictions as of June 2024), 1,245 kidnapping charges (resulting in 354 convictions), 6,744 sexual assault charges (resulting in 3,537 convictions), 7,763 sexual offense charges (resulting in 3,537 sexual offense convictions), and 6,560 weapons charges (resulting in 2,138 weapons convictions). Texas includes another category called “All Other Offenses,” which tallies 298,912 (and 103,265 convictions).
The Texas data reveals hundreds of dead people who should be alive, thousands of sexual assault and sexual offense victims who should never have suffered trauma, and tens of thousands of assault charges involving victims who should not have been hurt.
The Texas data shows that criminal aliens clogged up the justice system and took up police time that could have been dedicated to deterring or punishing American criminals. Thousands of drug, burglary, robbery, and weapons charges need not have jammed the Texas criminal justice systems at taxpayer cost.
In all, more than 32,000 people identified by DHS as living in the country illegally were imprisoned in Texas. But this appears to be an undercount, despite Texas’s efforts. We know this because the Texas program found that another 10,748 illegal aliens since 2011, people whose immigration status hadn’t been federally determined at the time of arrest and was only later determined when they were sent to Texas state prisons. There must be far more.
Among them were prisoners serving time for 134 more unnecessary, preventable homicides. The graves of their dozens of victims are as real as those of the few who have drawn national media attention.
The huge scale of seven million or more strangers allowed to enter the United States over the past three-plus years means the size of the criminal class among them must be historically large as well. All of the extra crimes they commit could be prevented by the exercise of lawful detention and deportation.
Far fewer bad things will happen if Americans finally slam the comparative-crime-rates door with its fake stairwell and open the correct one.
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