In this week’s column I wondered out loud about the question
of the day: If the federales succeed in banishing all undocumented immigrants
from Illinois, would that be a good thing or a bad thing? Much evidence
suggests it would be a bad thing, on balance, but there is much more that can
and ought to be said.
One of the issues I touched on was crime. Kevin
Drum over a Mother Jones is a sane and sensible critic of contemporary
life. He looked at the complicated question of whether immigrants, as Donald
Trump insists on believing, immigrants are more prone to crime than other
groups like, say, bankers.
Drum’s review of what’s known is illuminating. His
conclusion? It’s a fake issue. “There are lots of crime studies out there, and
they come to lots of different conclusions about immigrants,” he writes. “But
if you take them all together and look at them fair-mindedly, there’s really no
good reason for thinking that immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than
natives. They might very well commit crimes at lower rates. They certainly have
more motivation to be law-abiding than most of us.”
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 1, 2017.
