Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.—Gustav Mahler

Friday, March 18, 2016

Immigration Up, Crime Down

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1 comment:

Tom Van Dyke said...

Although the chart shows a leveling off, it depends on whether Pew is authoritative.

Yet even as deportations drop, the flow of new illegal immigrants appears to be accelerating. Since illegal immigration is difficult to measure, many experts use the rate of apprehensions at the border as a rough proxy for the overall flow. After a recession-induced pause in 2008-2010, apprehensions of would-be border-crossers jumped 15 percent in fiscal 2013 over fiscal 2012—and then spiked 16 percent further in fiscal 2014 over fiscal 2013.

On the subject of crime, ibid.,

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/the-problem-with-downplaying-immigrant-crime/399905/

since 12M illegals represent only <3% of the total US population, declining crime rates as a whole could offset a bump created by illegal immigrants, thus the implied correlation here of the two datasets is not probative.

On the whole, I don't think they come here to commit crime, but neither can or should illegal immigrant crime be summarily waved away.

Many leading politicians have expressed concern over Kathryn Steinle’s sad death. They typically represent the crime as something aberrational. Hillary Clinton, for example, said that San Francisco authorities “made a mistake” when they released Lopez-Sanchez into the community. Jeb Bush said, “The system broke down for [Steinle] and her family, and you can see why people are upset about that.”

Trump, however, had already staked out a position that defined the Steinle killing as anything but aberrational. The system didn’t break down for Steinle. It functioned as it all too often does. As Senator Ted Cruz pointed out during a July 21 Judiciary Committee hearing on crimes by illegal immigrants, in 2014 alone, immigration authorities released into American communities 193 illegal immigrants with homicide convictions, 426 people with sexual-assault convictions and 16,000 with drunk-driving convictions. Altogether, 104,000 people who by law should have been deported were instead allowed to remain on American soil. The director of the agency in charge of the removals offered as a partial excuse that immigration courts faced a backlog of 500,000 cases.

Whatever the cause, there’s no doubt that removals of immigrants convicted of criminal acts have tumbled in Obama’s second term, after a sharp rise in his first term. Federal immigration authorities removed more than 216,000 such immigrants from the United States in fiscal year 2011, more than double the removals of fiscal 2007. But in fiscal 2014, only 178,000 were removed—a 17 percent drop from the 2011 peak.