Immigrants Commit Far Less Crimes Than “Native” Citizens
| February 26th, 2008 | Crossposted from The Blog and the BulletAlex Thurston, of the blog The Seminal, blogs about a recent study put out by the Public Policy Institute of California:
This report, which suggests that immigrants (both legal and illegal) commit fewer crimes than native-born American citizens in California, caught my eye today. I’m sure xenophobes will dismiss the results, and offer plenty of anecdotes to back up their claims that all immigrants are criminals, but the article speaks for itself:
February 26th, 2008 at 8:16 pm
I’m working on finding the actual report, as reported versions of papers tend to leave out some fairly substantial aspects of the papers, generally speaking. So far i’ve only found a working paper by the same author; if anyone else can find the cited report can you post a link?
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February 26th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Found it!
This comment was written by Sailorman.http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/cacounts/CC_208KBCC.pdf
I haven’t read it myself yet, but i encourage discussion to focus on the report and not the various reports about the report ;)
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February 26th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Too many glitches to list. I love how every piece of data (like the fact that illegals who commit crimes are usually deported, causing them to not be in our prisons, and making representation in the prison population a useless metric by which to judge) which undermines their thesis is something that it’s hard to know about or fully understand or completely integrate into their analysis. Whereas all the data that supports their thesis (immigrants as a group do not appear to be a particularly criminal lot) is golden and beautiful and true. Kind of like how there are lots of conservative Republicans, but hardly any liberal Democrats.
Also funny how the authors never seemed to bother to do something like, I don’t know, look at crime reporting, rather than total prison outcomes, to see what the trend is on the ground.
Agenda-based science is usually rubbish. This doesn’t appear to break that pattern.
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February 27th, 2008 at 6:21 am
[...] –One thing immigrants don’t do better than us native born folks. [...]
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February 27th, 2008 at 7:40 am
Something also to consider is that probably crimes by immigrants are likely within the same (i.e. immigrant) community and that this can skew statistics because I would expect that an illegal immigrant (or a legal immigrant with illegal immigrant relatives, which many have) would be reluctant to report a crime for fear of deportation.
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February 27th, 2008 at 10:39 am
So Robert, are you saying that you don’t believe that American poltical ideology is generally right slanted in comparison to other countries and the polls that say that more Americans self-identify as “conservative” than “liberal”?
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February 27th, 2008 at 11:01 am
Huh?
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February 27th, 2008 at 11:04 am
the fact that illegals who commit crimes are usually deported, causing them to not be in our prisons, and making representation in the prison population a useless metric by which to judge
Actually, the vast majority of undocumented people who are picked up for crimes are made to serve their criminal sentence before ICE comes to pick them up for deportation.
It’s interesting that this study comes out the same time that the AZ Republic found that, according to the Maricopa Sheriff’s records, the undocumented and legal resident crime rates are pretty much the same.
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February 27th, 2008 at 11:55 am
Robert:”Huh?”
Earlier Robert:”Kind of like how there are lots of conservative Republicans, but hardly any liberal Democrats.”
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February 27th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
[...] Immigrants Commit Far Less Crimes Than “Native” Citizens in California [...]
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February 27th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
What does the relative balance of the population have to do with whether people of strong views get the “strong” label?
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February 27th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
The polls I’m talking about measure results from folks that self-identified with a political ideology when given a variety of options that included “liberal” and “conservative”….. are they lying about their own beliefs? It’s definitely possible, but is that what you believe?
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February 27th, 2008 at 5:10 pm
I was referring to the regular media references to cons. Reps but not to lib. Dems as a counterpoint to how the reporting in the study seemed similarly selective. I wasn’t talking about the polls.
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February 28th, 2008 at 7:01 am
By the way, a grammatical nit to pick: the title should be “… far fewer …”, not “… far less …”. Crimes can be enumerated.
I cut up a pie. I give you a slice. I have less pie. I have fewer pieces of pie.
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