I am by nature even-keel, but these arguments about citizens committing crimes at higher rates than immigrants and, more generally, the claim that immigrants don’t contribute to the crime problem in America drive me up a wall. The loathing for our brothers and sisters in America that makes people prefer strangers over them has many people believing ridiculous things. Anti-American indoctrination in multiculturalism and the pathological humanitarianism associated with it derange our fellow citizens. We see a similar madness in European states. This is the result of transnationalist programming. Canadian psychologist Gad Saad calls this suicidal empathy. He’s right. Suicidal empathy is leading the West down a destructive path.
Joblessness is one of the strongest predictors of crime. When cheap foreign labor displaces native-born workers, there is a greater likelihood that the native born will engage in crime than the foreign workers who took their jobs. This expectation brackets the cultural differences that make some groups more criminogenic than others (ceteris paribus). I will come to that problem of culture in a moment. But for now, keeping that bracket place, and intuitively grasping the association between joblessness and crime (which decades of cross-sectional and longitudinal research repeatedly confirms), how do people not see that deporting immigrants and letting the native born have their jobs back would reduce the likelihood of crime among native born Americans? The same is true with the practice of corporations exporting American jobs to the Third World. Reshoring manufacturing and returning those jobs to Americans will reduce crime.
What is more, unemployment affects marriage, which is another key variable in predicting crime over the life course. In their landmark 1993 book, Crime in the Making: Pathways and Turning Points through Life, criminologists Robert Sampson and John Laub found that key turning points—such as stable employment and marriage —redirect even high-risk individuals away from crime by strengthening their ties to conventional society. These turning points intersect: unstable labor markets complicate long-term relationships; unstable relationships produce offspring with poor labor force attachment over the life course. Work and marriage are essential to healthy communities—and to reducing crime and violence.
When people say immigrants don’t contribute to the crime problem because they offend at lower rates than the native born, they have been conditioned to consider only whether the immigrant is engaged in crime—the significance of which they have also been conditioned to downplay (more on that in a moment). What is pushed out of the scope of possible understanding is the obvious: that the presence of immigrants changes the system in such a way that it affects the likelihood that native-born citizens will engage in crime. Thus, whatever crime the immigrant brings with his presence in America (which is considerable—and we must consider his victims), his presence increases crime and other deviant behaviors among the native born by alienating them from stable social bonds that make those behaviors less likely.
Also pushed out of the scope of possible understanding among those trained not to think holistically is the possibility that the rate of crime among children of immigrants converges over time with the crime rates of American natives. If the argument is that those who come here illegally have lower rates of crime than the native born because they bring with them a protective culture, then wouldn’t it stand to reason that, if you let them stay to have children and their children assimilate with America’s criminogenic culture, their criminal offending among their offspring will show similar rates as those of native-born Americans? Indeed, that is what we see, as the above chart clearly demonstrates.
If the argument is that more immigration leads to lower rates of crime overall because immigrants are somehow less prone to crime due to their upbringing, then are advocates of liberal immigration policy suggesting that the immigrant and his children never integrate with the host society? Promotion of multiculturalism and tolerance for the ethnic enclave suggests it.
There is, of course, no reason to suppose that immigrants overall are less crime-prone than the native born; the propensity to commit crime varies across ethnic, racial, and religious groups. There is, moreover, the situation of immigrant presence in the country; the immigrant crime rate is lower because legal immigrants comprise the group with significantly lower crime rates. The direct problem is the illegal immigrant (who has already broken the law by being here). Progressives lump these groups together to make the overall immigrant population look artificially lawful. They do not defend only legal immigrants, those with a lower propensity to commit crime (depending on the immigrant group); they defend illegal immigration, the most crime-prone immigrant type. Because of the problem of displacement identified above, both legal and illegal immigrants indirectly contributed to the native-born crime problem.
Then there is the problem of volume. Rates aside, if we add more people to a population, even if the newcomers commit crimes at a lower rate, the total number of crimes goes up. This prediction is mathematically unavoidable unless the added population commits zero crimes. For example, if citizens, let’s say 300 million people, have a crime rate of 5 per 1,000 or 1.5 million crimes, and illegal immigrants, let’s say 20 million people, have a crime rate of 2 per 1,000 or 40,000 crimes, even though immigrants commit crime at less than half the rate, they still add 40,000 crimes that wouldn’t exist if they weren’t here. Remove the 20 million, and there would be 40,000 fewer crimes. Per capita has its place, but not when it is used to deceive the public.
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The people who talk about the lower crime rates among immigrants, what are they suggesting? Is the solution to the crime problem replacing the native-born population with foreign-born populations? Moreover, it logically follows that deporting US citizens will lower the crime rate. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks has suggested this argument: that if the true goal of mass deportation is purely to lower the national crime rate and make communities safer, then logically, the government should be deporting native-born US citizens instead of immigrants, since getting rid of citizens would result in a much larger drop in crime.
Uygur is obviously making a satirical point. But what if he were told that the reason why US citizens have a higher crime rate is that black Americans are so drastically overrepresented in crime statistics that criminal offending among this population alone lies behind that statistic of higher crime among native-born Americans that progressives love to cite? This is the shocking fact Uygur avoids in his rants about immigration: remove black Americans from the calculations, and the native-born per-capita crime rate is drastically reduced, and for some crime, namely, property crime, which is the most common class of crimes in America, reverses the comparison.
I am not suggesting that a progressive like Uygur would suggest we remigrate blacks back to Africa. Of course not. Progressives would never agree to this. But is it not ironic that the population that indirectly suffers the most from immigration—black Americans—is the population Cenk unintentionally leaves out of his attempt at reductio ad absurdum? If he had his druthers, he’d keep all the illegal immigrants at the expense of black Americans.
I don’t want to see black Americans deported, either. Of course not. I want to see immigrants deported and black Americans given back the jobs that were taken from them by globalization and mass immigration. I want policies of economic nationalism so black America can rebuild the family and, with the well-known benefits of work and marriage, reduce the overrepresentation of blacks in crime and violence in America. Unlike progressives, I actually care about the fate of black Americans. Cenk and his ilk don’t really care about them. They don’t really care about the native-born working class in general. Why would they shill for the party of the transnational oligarchy—the Democratic Party—if they cared about working people?
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The fact of overrepresentation of certain groups in violent crime is often met with the rationalization on the left that crime and violence are individual phenomena, and that assigning the problem to groups is racist. Ironic, given that progressives think in terms of groups and identity. The purpose of selective rationalization is to disrupt recognition that violent crime roots in cultural and subcultural differences to keep the flow of immigrants coming. The reality is that not all cultures are the same. Moreover, cultures that are out of place don’t operate the same way they do in their places of origin. They are invasive. Immigrants who do not assimilate with the host culture are more likely to transgress the host culture’s normative rules in a myriad of ways. How could it be any other way?
I have taken great pains to explain that multiracialism and multiculturalism are entirely different animals. The West has managed racial diversity fairly well. The United States record of multiracialism is especially praiseworthy. Over ninety percent of blacks in America are descendants of the original slave population, and they have enjoyed equal rights everywhere in America for more than sixty years. Moreover, many Asian populations have integrated with American society.
Multiculturalism, by contrast, is not just an abject failure; it is an ideology designed to disintegrate nations. Some cultures are incompatible with the West, chiefly Islamic fundamentalism and the attitudes prevalent among MENA and some Asian populations. This is obvious in the overrepresentation of members of these cultures in violent crime. Just answer this question: which foreign-born groups and their offspring are overrepresented in the crime of rape across Europe? The answer is so obvious that the question becomes rhetorical.
The solution to crime and violence is not found in expansive law enforcement alone. As a liberal, I would much rather see less crime and violence in part because it makes an expansive law enforcement apparatus less necessary. America annually spends hundreds of billions on its criminal justice system. Today, the number of incarcerated individuals approaches two million, with millions more on probation and parole. The number of Americans with felony convictions is compounding every year. Nor is the solution found in censoring speech or obscuring the statistics that warn the public about the demographics of crime, or in defining deviance down, as sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan so aptly puts the problem of growing tolerance for deviance. Since we all agree that it would be wrong to deport native-born groups in America, a major piece of the solution to the problem of crime is ultimately found in immigration restrictions and remigration.
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Democratic talking points about immigration reveal a deep problem with that party and the progressive left (the democratic socialist) attached to its hip. But the party is not the sole problem. The other major group that wants immigrants is those industries that exploit cheap foreign labor. They want immigrants, legal and illegal, because immigrants represent superexploitable pools of labor—across labor-intensive and capital-intensive sectors—that drive down the wages of native workers by expanding the labor supply and, moreover, disrupting worker consciousness and politics by disorganizing communities and disintegrating the nation.
Why do so many Americans still believe the Democrats represent working people when the party is working with corporations at cross-purposes with the cultural and material interests of proletarian workers? This allegiance demonstrates the power of ideology. From the perspective of ordinary working-class communities—black, brown, white, and yellow—the arguments progressives use to sell mass immigration make no sense. Mass immigration will not shore up entitlements. Immigrants include old people, single mothers, and unhealthy people. Healthy immigrants are human beings who grow old and get sick. And have babies. All this burdens public infrastructure and resources. Immigrants take jobs from the native-born and drive down their wages, transferring hundreds of billions of dollars from the working class to the corporate class annually.
The United States is suffering its sharpest rise in poverty in more than 50 years. Why on earth would any person beyond the Democrats who want votes and corporations that seek profit think it is a good idea to add more people to the poverty rolls? There are more than seven million unemployed Americans in the United States—and this only counts those who are looking for work. Working families don’t need more foreign workers competing with husbands, wives, sons, and daughters looking for work. Americans need jobs to feed their families and stabilize their neighborhoods.
The progressive left position on immigration enables the superexploitation of labor. It is harmful to the interests of working-class Americans. It is criminogenic. The media didn’t report this, but during the period when millions were flowing across our borders under Joe Biden, the country experienced a violent crime wave across urban America, exacerbated by depolicing and other progressive criminal justice policies. President Trump is reversing the trends, but if Democrats regain power in Congress, the progress his administration has made will be reversed.
Immigration is politically and socially disorganizing. It disempowers working-class Americans. It burdens public services and infrastructure. It endangers the health, safety, and well-being of children and women on both sides of the border. The only thing that recommends it is cheap labor for corporations and votes for Democrats—and neither of those things is in the interests of working-class Americans.
Call your representatives and senators and demand that they stand with American working-class families by supporting CBP and ICE. Encourage the Trump Administration to ramp up deportations. Demand that the government put its energies into strengthening our communities and our nation by investing in education, job training, and infrastructure, and reshoring industry in America that hires Americans. Tell them to put Americans first.
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I have written numerous articles on the problem of immigration. I won’t list them all here, but here are five (stretching back several years) that seem most relevant: The Problem of Immigrant Crime and Its Apologists; The Project to Disorder America: More on the Problem of Immigrant Crime and Its Apologists; The Crime of Illegally Entering the United States; Obscuring the Crime-Immigration Connection; What is the Relationship of Immigration to Crime?
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