It's Funny How Immigration and Crime are Trending in Opposite Directions
Another "hill I will die on" post.
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has returned from Serbia back to the United States. I will write something in the next few days about what I learned while in the western Balkans. For now, the most interesting takeaway was that despite considerable Serbian antipathy towards the European Union, most young Serbs are taking advantage of visa-free access to work and study in the EU. This has provided considerable employment opportunities for younger Serbs, aiding the overall economy. It is almost as if immigration benefits both the home and host economies!
I bring this up because it ties in with a continuing series of “Hill I Will Die On” posts regarding the massive benefits the United States reaps from immigration. The latest data point comes from the Brooking Institution’s Wendy Edelberg and Tara Watson:
Faster population and labor force growth has meant that employment could grow more quickly than previously believed without adding to inflationary pressures. In addition, greater immigration has likely resulted in greater consumer spending growth, the strength of which has persistently surprised observers. If immigration trends continue at high levels in 2024 as CBO expects, employment growth and economic activity will likely continue to be affected. For example, monthly employment gains of 200,000 may well reflect a sustainable pace of labor market growth. Immigration will continue to be a substantial determinant of population and labor force growth going forward.
Edelberg told Axios’ Neil Irwin and Courtenay Brown, “It seemed rather surprising to me that we could be so close to the inflation target, and employment growth would still be well above the pace I thought was consistent with a sustainable labor market…. Our analysis shows they have been really positive for the overall economy and, frankly, really positive for the federal budget.”
Axios’ Irwin and Brown note that these findings jibe with other economic analyses of the recent immigration wave:
Immigration policy is deeply politically contentious, but there is a strong consensus among economic policymakers that the immigration increase is a key part of the labor supply surge that helped bring down price pressures last year even amid the economy's robust growth….
"It's just arithmetic," Powell told the House Financial Services Committee. "If you add a couple million people to an economy, a percentage of them work, there will be more output."
"I'm just reporting the facts there," he added. "I'm not going to say anything is needed for the future or good policy indirectly or directly. I think it's just reporting the facts to say that immigration and labor force participation both contributed to the very strong economic output growth that we had last year."
Now is usually the point when some immigration restrictionists enter the chat to say two things. First, there is some variant of, “how dare you conflate legal immigration with the chaos at the southern border!” Second, there is some lament about how “all these migrants are triggering a crime wave.”1
The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to see a more rational immigration process in handling asylum requests at the border. But let’s make two things clear:
The influx of undocumented migrants is an important part of the increased-economic-growth-with-falling-inflation story; and
There. Is. No. Migrant-fueled. Crime. Wave. If anything the influx of migrants has likely lowered crime rates.
On the first point, Edelberg and Watson’s report is pretty clear cut. As they write, “the biggest change relative to the past” in the surge of immigrants comes from “immigrants with a nonlegal or pending status” — more than 2.4 million in 2023. This includes those seeking asylum at the southern border as well as others granted temporary protected status. That represents more than 70 percent of the immigrant inflow from 2023.
As for immigrant-fueled crime… well, there’s a big problem with this hypothesis. As I noted late last year, most forms of crime have dropped dramatically in 2023, just as immigration surged. As NBC News’ Ken Dilanian reported, there is every sign this trend accelerated in the fourth quarter of last year:
The new fourth-quarter numbers showed a 13% decline in murder in 2023 from 2022, a 6% decline in reported violent crime and a 4% decline in reported property crime. That’s based on data from around 13,000 law enforcement agencies, policing about 82% of the U.S. population, that provided the FBI with data through December.
“It suggests that when we get the final data in October, we will have seen likely the largest one-year decline in murder that has ever been recorded,” said Jeff Asher, a former CIA analyst who now studies crime trends.
Now, the surge in immigration and drop in crime are a classic “correlation does not equal causation” story in social science. It is theoretically possible that crime could have dropped even further absent the surge in immigration! This is what former president and current candidate Donald Trump thinks! According to the New York Times’ Anjali Huynh and Michael Gold, over the weekend Trump, “asserted, without evidence, that other countries were emptying their prisons of ‘young people’ and sending them across the border. ‘I don’t know if you call them “people,” in some cases,’ he said. ‘They’re not people, in my opinion.’ He later referred to them as ‘animals.’”
Trump’s rhetoric is bigoted in every which way. He also happens to be wrong. Last month NBC News’ Olympia Sonnier and Garrett Haake found that Trump’s claim was, to use a technical term, unmitigated horseshit:
An NBC News review of available 2024 crime data from the cities targeted by Texas’ “Operation Lone Star,” which buses or flies migrants from the border to major cities in the interior — shows overall crime levels dropping in those cities that have received the most migrants.
Overall crime is down year over year in Philadelphia, Chicago, Denver, New York and Los Angeles. Crime has risen in Washington, D.C., but local officials do not attribute the spike to migrants.
“This is a public perception problem. It’s always based upon these kinds of flashpoint events where an immigrant commits a crime,” explains Graham Ousey, a professor at the College of William & Mary and the co-author of “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock.” “There’s no evidence for there being any relationship between somebody’s immigrant status and their involvement in crime.”….
“At least a couple of recent studies show that undocumented immigrants are also not more likely to be involved in crime,” Ousey says — in part because of caution about their immigration status. “The individual-level studies actually show that they’re less involved than native-born citizens or second-generation immigrants.”
Another misconception often cited by critics is that crime is more prevalent in “sanctuary cities.” But a Department of Justice report found that “there was no evidence that the percentage of unauthorized or authorized immigrant population at the city level impacted shifts in the homicide rates and no evidence that immigration is connected to robbery at the city level.”
Why do I continue to harp on these findings? For the same reason the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell does: to correct one of the American public’s biggest misperceptions:
Myths and misinformation about immigrants (whether legal or undocumented) abound, including whether they’re more likely to commit crimes (they’re not). Or whether immigrants hurt the economy (they don’t; they are net-positive contributors to the economy and federal budgets). Such misunderstandings are one reason I write about immigration: If Americans had better information, they might be more likely to see immigration’s benefits for America’s finances, national security and moral standing in the world.
To sum up: immigrants are making America great again, and they are contributing to a reduction in crime back to pre-pandemic levels. And anyone who tells you differently is selling you something noxious.
To be fair, polling shows that a majority of Americans believe the latter point to be true.
I am a 69 y.o. woman, retired from my landscape business, but still serving a few clients and doing habitat design. Yesterday, I was working with another good local contractor (hard to find these days, as grass cutters are not landscapers) to whom I want to turn over to care for a beloved client and I worked with his three Hispanic workers who I was training to recognize and be aware of the various emerging plantings. These three guys not only absorbed what I demonstrated to them, but worked circles around me, and were polite, thorough, and an absolute delight to work with. Over the years, I have met and worked with people from Mexico, Peru, and various parts of South and Central America. These folks have been human benchmarks in my life, demonstrating kindness, love of family, a work ethic not seen much in the US these days, and their good cheer, amidst all the humiliating treatment doled out to them by supposedly Christian Americans.
Immigrants feed America. Almost everything we eat is planted, picked, or processed by immigrants.
Americans have forgotten where they came from, and are fools for treating these primarily good folks like criminals.
Claire's most important point: "Create simple, legal pathways..." That's what conservatives don't seem to understand. We can't just declare something legal or illegal. First, a correct way to do things must be established and all the apparatuses for doing things correctly must be put into place.