RNC Speakers Give Exaggerated Impression of Immigrant Crime

At the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Tuesday night, speakers drilled the Biden administration on its handling of immigration and the border, linking current migration trends to increased crime and disorder across the country. The night’s official theme was “Make America Safe Again,” but the programming was light on specific ideas about how to do that. Instead, there were a lot of individual lurid tales of migrant crime.

“Americans are dying, murdered, assaulted, raped by illegal immigrants that the Democrats have released,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) argued. Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley called the border “the single biggest threat Americans face.” House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R–La.) warned that “prisons are being emptied,” suggesting that those people are now free to cross the border into the United States.

Politicians told horrific stories of migrants attacking American women and girls, while family members of people killed by illegal immigrants blamed the Biden administration and its border policy. There’s no question that some migrants have crossed the border and gone on to commit heinous acts, but Tuesday’s speakers painted an exaggerated picture of the link between immigration and crime.

Crime is down in the cities that received the most migrants through Texas’ busing efforts under Operation Lone Star, an NBC News analysis found in February. “Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles,” NBC reported.

More generally, numerous studies have found that immigrants—both legally and illegally present—do not commit crimes at higher rates than native-born Americans.

A 2018 meta-analysis by criminologist Charis Kubrin and sociologist Graham Ousey, which looked at studies spanning two decades, found no significant relationship between immigration and crime. A 2015 report by the Migration Policy Institute indicated that undocumented immigrants have a lower felony conviction rate than the overall U.S. population. Illegal immigration doesn’t lead to an increase in violent crime, found a 2017 study by sociologists Michael Light and Ty Miller, relying on data from all 50 states and Washington, D.C., from 1990 to 2014.

“A disproportionate number of undocumented immigrants are convicted of driving without a license” or “using a false Social Security Number,” notes the Law Enforcement Immigration Task Force. But immigrants “are less prone” to committing crimes that are unrelated to their immigration status, it continues. “Existing evidence shows that immigrants do not represent a threat to public safety any more than every other segment of the population.”

Several RNC speakers, particularly those with recent immigrant backgrounds, spoke positively about legal immigration. The conversation rarely got more nuanced than that.

No one came close to conveying just how difficult it is for the vast majority of people to immigrate to the U.S. legally. The “migrant crime” narrative, which has become a favorite campaign trail subject of former President Donald Trump, was far more popular.

Tuesday night’s speakers echoed Trump’s tone, repeatedly calling for the border to be closed and scores of undocumented immigrants to be deported. But these aren’t statistically informed conclusions, nor are they attainable or realistic policy goals.

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