“Furriners” Ain’t The Problem, Part 3

Finally, the alleged “crime” problem owing to illegals is the ultimate red herring. Most of the “crimes” committed by border crossers result from a 1929 law which, for the first time after 140 years of essentially “open borders”, made unlawful entry into the US a federal misdemeanor on the first offense, and a felony on the second.

Not incidentally, this law was authored by Senator Coleman Livingston Blease of South Carolina. Blease was a notorious white supremacist who had not inconsiderable support from the Klu Klux Klan and other nativist forces.

Self-evidently, a large-scale Guest Worker program would eliminate 99% of the so-called crimes authored by Senator Blease because willing workers and their families would be enabled to enter the US legally. Beyond that, every population has a tiny fraction of societal misfits and criminals, but there is no reason throw massive barriers in front of willing workers wishing to enter the US on account of this truism.

The real issue is whether undocumented immigrant populations have disproportionately higher rates of criminal conduct, but countless studies show that crime rates are actually lower among these groups than among native-born American populations. In this regard, a study based on uniquely comprehensive arrest data for 2012 through 2018 from the Texas Department of Public Safety is especially dispositive. After all, Texas is ground zero for the alleged flood of border crime.

This definitive study found that undocumented immigrants have substantially lower crime rates than both native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses. Relative to undocumented immigrants, US-born citizens are:

• over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes,

• 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and

• over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.

In addition, the proportion of arrests involving undocumented immigrants in Texas was relatively stable or decreasing over the 2012 to 2018 period, at the very time the Donald was waving the bloody shirt of purportedly rising immigrant crime.