Welcome to Debunker, a weekly breakdown of misleading (and sometimes flat-out wrong!) news from the worlds of science, health, and more—for Beast Inside members only.
On Monday morning, President Trump took to Twitter to attack the caravan of migrants traveling towards the U.S.-Mexico border. In his post, he used an all-too-common fear tactic—linking immigrants with criminal activity.
“Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border,” Trump wrote. “Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”
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The president’s tweets coincided with a report on Monday of preparations for 5,000 troops to arrive at the border in time for the caravan’s arrival in what has been labeled “Operation Faithful Patriot”—more than twice the number of soldiers that were deployed in Syria to fight ISIS as of December 2017.
The group of Central American migrants, most from Honduras and Guatemala, are still hundreds of miles from the border and their arrivals will likely be scattered. More importantly, they’ll be seeking asylum at points of entry—not storming the border.
This isn’t the first time that Trump has claimed a group of immigrants could have criminal intentions; he kicked off his presidential campaign with the divisive statement that, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending the best ... they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
Since then, that refrain has been used time and again to justify anti-immigrant policies—like crusading to build a border wall, shutter DACA, and forcibly separate children from their families. But the science is clear: Immigration has not been linked with an uptick in violent crime.
There Is No Link Between Undocumented Immigration and Violent Crime
In March 2018, a study in the journal Criminology examined the FBI’s state-level crime statistics from 1990 to 2014 on murder, robbery, aggravated assault, and rape, alongside data tracking the population of undocumented immigrants.
The authors concluded that “Undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative.”
The authors’ results are supported by a February 2018 study conducted in Texas by the CATO Institute. The CATO authors analyzed criminal conviction and arrest rates in the state in 2015 (the most recent year in which data was available) for documented and undocumented immigrants, and came to the same conclusion.
“In Texas in 2015, the criminal conviction and arrest rates for immigrants were well below those of native-born Americans,” the authors wrote. “Moreover, the conviction and arrest rates for illegal immigrants were lower than those for native-born Americans. This result holds for most crimes.”
The numbers were striking. “As a percentage of their respective populations,” the study noted, “there were 50 percent fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of native-born Americans.”
There’s No Link Between Any Immigration and Violent Crime
A 2014 study from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management analyzed crime reports between 1980 and 2000 alongside local population records. The author wrote that although three-quarters of Americans believe the link between crime and immigration, “There’s essentially no correlation between immigrants and violent crime.”
“When you look at neighborhoods where lots of immigrants live, these are typically not the best neighborhoods,” he added. “These are violent places. So there’s this anecdotal association [between immigrants and violent crime] that just doesn’t turn out to be true in the data.”
That finding was backed by a 2008 study from The Public Policy Institute of California, which found that within the state of California, “on average, between 2000 and 2005, cities that had a higher share of recent immigrants saw their crime rates fall further than cities with a lower share. This finding is especially strong when it comes to violent crime.”
And in 2015, associate professor of Sociology at the University of Buffalo Robert Adelman conducted one of the largest immigration-crime studies on record, which examined 40 years of metropolitan crime data between 1970 and 2010. The results, published in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, came to the exact same conclusion: There is zero link between immigrants and an uptick in violent crime. In fact, Adelman writes that it might be the exact opposite, noting that “immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g. murder) and property (e.g. burglary) crime throughout the time period.”
Immigrants Are Incarcerated Far Less Than Native-Born Americans
In the same Public Policy Institute study, the authors found that immigrants were incarcerated at a disproportionately low rate. Although foreign-born Californian men constituted 35 percent of the general adult population, the authors note, they only made up 17 percent of the adult prison population.
In fact, the people who were getting incarcerated were actually U.S.-born men between the ages of 18 and 40. When counting institutionalization that resulted from criminal activity, U.S.-born men were more than 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than foreign-born men in the same age range, wrote the authors.
So… Why Do We Keep Hearing This?
Despite the mountains of evidence showing otherwise, Trump continues to insist that immigrants are linked to violent crime. And no matter how far-fetched the claims get, the GOP seems hell-bent on doubling down on their rhetoric.
“It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate,” a senior Trump administration official told The Daily Beast last week in an article on Trump’s caravan comments. “This is the play.”
“It's an issue that motivates Trump's most ardent conservative base,” another operative said. “If your worry was that we’re not going to be able to turn our base voters out, well—what’s the opposite of kryptonite?”
