• Hegar@fedia.io
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    2 months ago

    I’m using the well-published stats from Texas: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2014704117

    There aren’t a lot of good data about this, but that’s one of the more detailed that I’ve found from googling and seen referenced in a lot of articles and papers. It seems to have held up to some right wing scrutiny as well. I’m not an expert, just an interested nerd.

    Figure 3 gives ~900 arrests per 100,000 people as the crime rate for official-channels migrants. Close to 1%. Undocumented immigrants come in at ~half that. Presidential arrest rate is 1 per 46, close to 2%.

    From my reading there are some legitimate reasons to think the undocumented crime rate may be higher, but also that crime by immigrants may be even lower.

    Undocumented people report crimes against themselves at a much lower rate. Because you’re more likely to be a target of crime by a member of your own group, this probably means crimes by undocumented people are more likely to target undocumented people and go under-reported.

    But the crime rate is judged by arrests, so if Texas law enforcement shows more willingness to arrest migrants than citizens - which seems v. likely to me - then we’d expect these numbers to over-estimate crimes by migrants.