I think there may be an apples an oranges thing here. Over many years I have seen (detailed econometric) studies that control for many exogenous factors, confirming that immigrants provide a positve boost to the economy, have higher education levels, their kids beat out natives in SAT scores aand college admissions -- and do indeed have a lower crime rate. Anyone that knows legal immigrants knows they tend to be very gung-ho on being good citizens. Mnay of these are professions -- doctors, IS types, etc. That they have lower crime rates is not surprising.
The bulk of these studies are on legal immigrants, I believe. Perhaps some are of both legal an illegal. But the article implies that the illegal immigrants are about 33% of the total immigrant population. Thus, even if both are in some studies, the effect of illegals is muted by the higher number of leagal immigrants. On the other hand, the FBI crime stats I have seen solely on illegal immigrants are surpisingly (shockingly) high. Which is not a huge surprise give they are much more disenfranchised, only have marginal jobs available to them etc. I ma not convinced that the stats I saw were not packaged in some unfair way. I have not drawn any firm conclusions. But the hypothesis that illegal aliens commit a higher level of crime is plausible, IMO. --- In [email protected], "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In [email protected], Vaj <vajranatha@> wrote: > > > > > Sorry, but if you'd checked the link I provided, > you'd have found the percentages were holding > steady as of the latest study, from February 2007. > > > Obviously you don't get out much. > > Obviously you prefer anti-immigrant myths to > actual crime stats. > > > I've seen entire cities > > demographics change in the course of a decade or two. > > How absolutely ghastly. I've heard that happened > in New York City a century or so ago. Just terrible. > It could have been such a great city. > > However, the issue here was whether immigrants > commit crimes at a greater rate than native- > born Americans, as you suggested they did. > > They actually commit crimes at about one-fifth > the rate of native-borns. > > And as I noted, the more they assimilate--the > more like us they become--the more crimes they > commit. So perhaps the rise in the overall crime > rate is due to a higher rate of assimilation > among immigrants. >
