First, getting some things straight:
- Men commit more violent crimes, all things being equal, more men = more crime.
- Evidence: Look at gender breakdown of prisons
- People with jobs and college degrees commit fewer crimes
- Evidence: Selection bias. It's difficult to land job and school placements after committing crimes
Facts about immigration:
- Legal migrants on work-based visas tend to have skills higher than the 'native' population
- Illegal migrants tend to have skills and income lower than the 'native' population
- When immigration is infrequent or difficult or motivated, it can be assumed to have selection effects regardless of social status or background. (immigration itself sets a 'higher standard' by selection effect)
Immediate conclusions:
- If migration is trivial and groups of migrants are large, of nearly equal cultural context and predominantly male, crime must go up.
- Example: If all the men in Houston decided to move to Dallas, we can expect crime in Dallas to increase.
- If gender skew is not a social issue, then one wonders why WaPo is publishing an article titled 'Too Many Men' about India and China
- If migration is difficult or a specific sample of a population, then selection bias may turn migrants of all categories into 'model citizens' in comparison to the 'native' population
Crass categories created for the sake of discussion:
- "Gentrifiers" - highly skilled legal migrants that are often criticized for transforming much of the coasts (and especially the Bay Area) into very nice but very expensive areas
- "Illegals" - low skill immigrants that in the American context currently tend to be from Central or South America.
The Studies
Study 1. New York Times: "The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant"
Why it's a silly study: No serious people are actually arguing that lawful immigrants increase crime, so most of the charts are meaningless
Study 2. Cato Institute "Criminal Immigrants in Texas"
Why it's a silly study:
The conclusion:
"The homicide conviction rate for illegal immigrants was 25 percent below that of native-born Americans in Texas in 2015. The conviction rates for illegal immigrants were 11.5 percent and 79 percent below that of native-born Americans for the crimes of sexual assault and larceny, respectively. Illegal immigrants were more likely to be convicted of gambling, kidnapping, smuggling, and vagrancy than natives, but those crimes constituted only 0.18 percent of all convictions that year in Texas. For all criminal convictions in Texas in 2015, illegal immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 56 percent below that of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 85 percent below that of native-born Americans."
Essentially the 'win' for illegal migrants is that they are less homicidal than Americans living in Texas. The problem is that Texas is outlier in terms of American homicide rates - that people manage to do better than Texas' homicide rate while still being worse in other criminal categories is not particularly impressive to those living in blue states surrounded by gentrifiers.
Study 3. American Society of Criminology "DOES UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRATION INCREASE VIOLENT CRIME?"
Why it's a better study: It appears to attempt to control for many things and make insightful comparisons.
The conclusions are broadly that illegal migration is correlated with a reduction in violent crime and does not suppress reporting.
The study also has interesting discussion about how undocumented migrants rely on social networks, which may explain how they may be less likely to commit violent crimes - their network would fade rapidly if they were victimizing many people.
And the study continues: [emphasis added]
"Second, across each model, the effects of unauthorized immigration are in addition to the significant reductions in violent crime stemming from lawful immigration, thus, underscoring the importance of examining these populations separately. In other words, the results across models 1–6 demonstrate that lawful and undocumented immigration have independent negative effects on criminal violence."
Study 4. CIS - Immigration and Crime - Assessing a conflicted issue :
Why this study needs no analysis: The conclusion appears to be 'it's hard to know', which is undeniably true and difficult to argue with.
Study 5. Migration Letters - "Investigating the Offending Histories of Undocumented Immigrants"
Why this study is a little bit silly: A large part of the study relies on self-reported data from juvenile offenders in three states, while the arrest records appear to be from only 1 county in California. Conclusions are really hard to make with this information.
The Answers
Question: Has illegal migration increased crime in the United States?
Answer: Probably not. While it's very difficult to know for certain, there is evidence that selection bias means the illegal migrant population is overall less likely to commit violent crimes.
Question: Will this remain true for future illegal migrants?
Answer: Only if selection pressures remain. Ironically, America can expect to see a larger positive impact of illegal migrants if it becomes more difficult to be an illegal migrant.
Selection pressures:
- Small overall subset of the population (e.g. illegal immigration rate can't include literally everyone in Central America in one year)
- Difficulty/cost of the journey (the costlier, the more selection pressure)
- Reliance on a social network (the more undocumented migrants have to rely on social networks, the more selective the process is)
Question: Will this remain true for children of illegal migrants?
Answer: No. Cato Institute has already demonstrated that Dreamers actually commit crimes at a rate similar to other Americans - they integrate!
Question: Is illegal immigration paying an opportunity cost?
Answer: Maybe. If illegal migration suppresses legal migration or political support for legal migration, then America is paying an overall cost of having not been able to decrease crime even more by accepting greater numbers of gentrifiers. If there is in some sense a zero sum game between 'gentrifiers' and 'illegals', then choosing illegals over gentrifiers is a mistake.
Question: Are there other reasons to be against illegal immigration?
Answer: Absolutely. There is a lot of data that says that all types of immigration increases housing prices. Illegal immigrants may keep wages low in certain sectors of the economy. The tragic comedy is that more illegal immigration seems to primarily depress the wages of other illegal immigrants. However, if one is a true believer in union protectionism, employment of illegal immigrants is by definition reducing the overall role of worker protections and labor unions in the economy.
What Immigration Policy Must Do
- Keep the men out (or 'maintain gender balance' of human migration)
- Make illegal migration difficult, promote legal avenues instead
As it's currently quite in fashion to be concerned about the role of men in society (#MeToo, #TimesUp, etc), then it must be made clear that nearly every immigration category is dominated by men. Legal immigration is dominated by men, and in many countries asylum seekers are also predominately men. The image of refugees being families and illegal migrants being working mothers is an overall misleading picture. Young men make up the population of the earth that is most able to move and are therefore most of the potential immigrants. Being blindly in support of immigration while maintaining an infantile disdain towards the 'patriarchy', 'toxic masculinity', and 'male entitlement' is to believe in a completely contradictory picture of the world. Championing immigration as it exists today, legal or otherwise, is to champion men as both victims (we wouldn't dare exclude them!) and saviors (our economy would die without them!). Policing males in our spaces is either imperative or it is not.
Further, it is clear that restrictive immigration policy has made immigration great again. The more restrictive policy, the more lovely immigration as policy will appear to be, as humans cannot adequately judge what process is capable of scaling. Immigration will be increasingly seen as a solution to GDP woes or labor market challenges. There will be no problem that can't be solved by immigration as 'immigrants' is not a word that simply means 'more humans' when the political conception of immigrants are the hard working superheroes with harrowing stories about crossing deserts and seas.
Go ahead and build the wall - not because it's a good investment, it's not. The wall will be like a real world talent show - those that manage to jump it will inspire America and also be ready to represent it in the Olympics.