“I asked criminologists about immigration and crime in the US. Their answers may surprise you.” That’s the headline from CNN a couple of days ago. The reporter is Catherine Shoichet. The criminologists are Charis Kubrin and Graham Ousey who “literally wrote the book on immigration and crime.” The book is Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock, published by Springer.
Kubrin and Ousey report that “in general, on average, we do not find a connection between immigration and crime, as is so often claimed. The most common finding across all these different kinds of studies is that immigration to an area is either not associated with crime in that area, or is negatively associated with crime in that area. Meaning more immigration equals less crime. It’s rare to find studies that show crime following increases in immigration or with larger percentage of the population that are immigrants.”
I don’t know. Last year we saw the single largest increasing in the US population in history, almost all of it illegal immigration, and I find it impossible to ignore that major crime wave associated with that fact.
But we reads on, Hobbitses… Here, towards the end…
“The problem is—and this is definitely like a blue state, red state issue—for a lot of the blue states, we don’t even record immigration status. We don’t really care about that. If you’re committing a crime, we’re going to arrest you. We’re going to put you in jail. If it comes up that you’re not a citizen, and we’re kind of mad at you, then we’re going to maybe turn you over to ICE. But the reality is, a lot of times, we’ll just put you through our system and treat you like every other criminal.”
So you have to read all the way down to the end to learn that in blue states—and make that blue cities, too—immigrant status isn’t recorded in statics on crime reported to the police, arrests, and clearance. In other words: they don’t know.
Wouldn’t it have been nice (as in honest) had Shoichet began the article that way?
However, this is not because they couldn’t know. They don’t look later in the process where immigration status is usually determined.
And this right here: “[M]any people that will respond to those public opinion polls [I will show you the poll in a minute in a moment] and will recognize that immigrants, you know, have contributed greatly in beneficial ways to society. So it’s like, what are the driving forces that perpetuate, that you know that association (between immigration and crime)? And why does it have so much power?”
Immigrants are associated with half a trillion dollars annually transferred from the native working class to the capitalist class. So when they say immigrants “have contributed greatly in beneficial ways to society,” what they mean is that immigration greatly benefits the capitalist class and its functionaries. In addition to experiencing lower wages and greater job insecurity, native born workers also pay the taxes that support illegal immigrants. So it doesn’t benefit them at all. Add on top of this the reality that immigration is associated with serious crime and social disorder and all that might tell you why it has so much power.
Moreover, as I argued recently on Freedom and Reason (see Crime, Immigration, and the Economy), the crime problem in inner-city black-majority neighborhoods is largely the result of the effects of two historical events: the ghettoization of blacks during the Great Migration and the radical transformation of immigration laws that occurred under President Johnson. It hardly seems a coincidence that a year after recognizing the civil rights of black people, Democrats opened the border to mass immigration. Thus an indirect effect of mass immigration is higher crime among the demographic progressives idled.
This move also devastated labor unions, I hasten to add. It worked the same destruction in France. Mass immigration is a capitalist strategy to screw labor and disorganize their political organizations.
About that poll. Crime wasn’t the focus of Pew’s recent survey, which found that Americans overwhelmingly fault the government for how it’s handled the situation at the border, but when those surveyed were asked specifically about the impact of the migrant influx on crime, the pollsters found that while 85 percent of Republicans linked the migrant influx to crime, only 31 percent of Democrats did.
That the juxtaposition of that poll and the findings of two criminologists who “literally wrote the book on immigration and crime” is designed to make Republicans who believe there is an immigration and crime problem appear to be imagining things. I mean that is literally the point of the exercise.
freedom and reason 