No, immigrants aren’t making America more dangerous. But the truth is messier than that.
The data undercut the right’s fear campaign. Facts also undo the left’s clean narrative of “perfect” new arrivals. That’s the point.
I like to consider myself a reasonable person open to all reasonable points of view. Politically, my favorite people are those who will fight for what they think is right but can understand and respect those they disagree with because they’re standing up for their own beliefs.
Of course, beliefs can be mistaken.
Take my belief that the rules were being followed regarding people presenting themselves at the southern border during the Biden administration. My left-leaning bias led me to assume that officials were following the law for those seeking asylum to be allowed into the country while their case was being processed.
Doing some reporting last year, it turns out the administration was — at least during the early days — processing people regardless of any legal claims, under the assumption they would be seeking asylum.
As a reasonable person, my objection to this is twofold. One, you may be acting humanely in allowing someone who risked their life to come to the U.S. to enter the country, but you are not following the law. Two, you are giving all these immigrants false hope they can stay, when asylum, even under the best of times, is not widely granted — especially if an immigrant has no legal representation.
What happened under Biden wasn’t illegal, per se; the White House has huge discretion regarding immigration policy. But much like what President Donald Trump is doing on immigration today, it’s just not right.
I was thinking of how things are never black and white when reader Mark Fenstermaker asked that I write about “the growing number of U.S. citizens who have been killed by illegal immigrants” along with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement efforts to “remove thousands of known criminals who had the potential to add to that number.”
» READ MORE: How the White House turned a Pennsylvania trooper’s death into an immigration scare story | Luis F. Carrasco
Data wise it’s difficult to offer a conclusive answer to that specific allegation, since law enforcement agencies rarely collect immigration or citizenship status (for victims or offenders). Fortunately, the great state of Texas once again comes through.
Analyses of Texas data, which include immigration status, find that the crime rate of undocumented immigrants in general is lower than that of the U.S.-born population, which is generally understood to be the case.
Regarding homicide, from 2013 to 2022 the conviction rate in Texas for illegal immigrants was 2.2 per 100,000 people, compared with 3.0 per 100,000 for native-born Americans, according to the libertarian Cato Institute. There are a couple of caveats that may push the conviction rate for illegal immigrants higher, but regardless, the rate is hardly zero.
Some immigrants in the country illegally kill, that is a fact. Another fact is that in the U.S., random killings are statistically rare. Yet the right-wing fearmongers will not tell you that broadly speaking, you are more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to be killed by a stranger, let alone a stranger who’s in the country illegally.
Even then, whether that immigrant came here under Biden or under Trump, the ultimate responsibility falls on the person who committed the crime.
Now, the impression that there is a “growing number” of people killed by immigrants is not helped by the Trump administration’s propaganda efforts. I do not begrudge the Department of Homeland Security regularly trumpeting that ICE has detained some of the “worst of the worst” — as immigration enforcement should. But claiming that crime rates have “plummeted” under Trump’s leadership because they’ve removed “criminal illegal aliens” is overblown to say the least.
Crime rates spiked during the pandemic, at a time when Trump closed the border to asylum seekers using the threat of COVID-19 as an excuse. The number of violent crimes committed has been steadily dropping since 2023. Using the administration’s logic, if anything, those six million or so immigrants who Biden let in are making America safer.
None of what I’m saying should be understood as minimizing the death of anyone at the hands of an immigrant who’s in the country illegally. As I’ve said before, there is no comfort for a victim’s loved ones to hear that immigrants commit fewer crimes than the U.S.-born. It would be ridiculous and heartless to answer someone’s pain with such a meaningless fact.
The best we can do is to demand that our media and our leaders do better. That they tell the real story and not whatever fits into their ideological narrative.
To the concerns of my conservative readers like Mr. Fenstermaker, there is often a knee-jerk reaction from many in the mainstream media to downplay crime by undocumented immigrants. Even when telling stories related to immigration, there is a penchant to focus on the unimpeachable “perfect immigrant” when the truth is that people are complicated and reality is messy. But there is also an undeniable push on the right to demonize and scare that should be unacceptable.
What’s much worse is that this is how too many of our leaders operate. You have Democrats who will romanticize immigrants and their experience to the point that people become a symbol and bad policy decisions are made. Then you have Republicans under Trump who push hate and division, and whose policies lead to suffering and harm.
I will choose the Democrats’ mistakes on this over the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant rampage any day of the week, but one cannot exist without the other. If we keep casting things in black and white, we will never be able to reasonably move forward.
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