When I read it, I found it impossible to determine the meanings of many statements without consulting the referenced papers. That being said, the papers referenced appear to be reputable - it’s just that there’s 137 of them in the biblio.
EDIT: And I read it far too quickly to get a really good comprehension of it, too, so I’ll admit to speaking from multiple layers of ignorance! Thanks for the critique and excerpt.
I completely agree - we need to destroy the notion that there is some amount of criminal activity that can justify dehumanization.
We shouldn’t just try to change the criteria for being human from one set of words to another, “black and brown” to “criminals and illegals”, and “white” to “citizens”, or say “these people aren’t even doing anything criminal”, we need to actually get rid of the idea that we can dehumanize humans.
Otherwise those words are just a cover for the same biases, or whatever new hatred we create to justify new wars.
IF you were to read the paper, you would see that they review a number of hypotheses for why immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born citizens and why places with large numbers of immigrants have lower crime rates. They hypothesize that, all else being equal, immigrants will lower crime rates and they try to control for many other confounding factors (income, age structure, economic structure).
The graph Cory posted isn’t the main take-home of this paper. It’s their regression results that show a constant negative relationship between % foreign born and crime rate, even when controlling for other factors. Now correlation is not causation, certainly. We can’t exactly set up a manipulative experiment to test the hypothesis directly. However, a relationship underpinned by a falsifiable a priori hypothesis carries a lot more weight that a relationship just interpreted post-hoc.
My biggest criticism of their paper, having read it, would be that they don’t make much of the weak fit between their model and different crime rates. So while immigration does seem to have a consistent negative effect on crime rate, the magnitude of that effect isn’t massive and there is a lot of unexplained variance.
Edit: The other big take home is that immigration doesn’t increase crime.
The empirical studies cited in the paper suggest just the opposite - that the crime rate among the foreign born population is lower than the general population.
While we might not be able to say, “Crime goes down because of immigrants,” can’t we at least say, “It’s not true that crime goes up because of immigrants”? And if so, isn’t that an important thing to be able to say, especially in our current blame-the-immigrants moment?
Yes, I realize that– that’s good… I was saying that even if the data showed the opposite, there are strong reasons to defend immigration… Whether a group of people commit more or less crime is irrelevant to their deserving of human rights. Creating a debate around whether immigrants commit more or less crime in a sense actually cedes ground to the opponents of immigration. I guess it’s important to counter blatant lies with fact, but it’s also important to not let the debate stray too far from the core ethical considerations.
This pretty much sums it up.
Kind of like moving to America from another country and being shocked to discover that not everybody is well educated and well travelled. This works both ways of course, just talk to any random collection of folks on the street in Shanghai!
Shh! You’re giving away the secrets of power!
Funny that picking apples and peaches does nothing to the crime rate, but picking cherries works every time. Heck, handwaving at cherries seems to work well enough. It is my understanding the cherry scent calms the criminal impulse, isn’t that why youth medicines are flavored that way?
Yeah, let’s get the burden of proof right. There may be nothing about the result of the paper that is absolutely incompatible with the idea that immigrants increase crime, and it’s probably not incompatible with the idea that immigrants don’t have a particular effect on crime in the long run.
But people who like to argue things like “immigrants commit a lot of crimes” tend to also try to shift the burden of proof onto people who disagree with them. Sure, they can come up with a crackpot theory as to why this study may have gotten things wrong, but looking at the results we can certainly say the following: It seems quite unlikely that immigration increases crime. If someone wants to argue reasonably, the ball is in their court.
Of course they don’t want to argue reasonably, so this kind of doesn’t matter. Who would have thought that all my rational thinking could be undone by one ignorant lout, what a world, what a world.
Yes 
We absolutely can say that, and we definitely should.
The whole “correlation is not causation” thing prevents us expecting to lower crime rates by bringing in immigrants.
But this study directly refutes the baseless, xenophobic, bigoted assertions that “immigrants cause an increase in crime.”
But - they secretly crave attention. That’s super sneaky.
That’s all the Latin americans. Regular americans don’t have xeno-anything!
data showed that foreign-born residents of the US were less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans
No problem, just make being foreign a crime and the data will correct themselves.
Greek
we will root out all the foreign influences
Yeah! FAKE NEWS!!!
But those are just facts!
Well, most violent and property crime is committed against the lower classes. So you see the Republicans do make sense!
