Good News on Crime Demands Fresh Perspective on Immigration

An April 15th headline in the Wall Street Journal announced the sort of welcome good news that every American ought to cheer: “HOMICIDES DROP IN MAJOR CITIES ACROSS THE U.S.”

Analysis of police records in 133 of the most populous metro areas across the country, showed the sharpest drops in rates of homicide in some thirty years. Nationwide, the number of murders had declined by 20% compared to the same calendar dates from last year. In some of the nation’s former crime hot spots, the decline in killings, and violent crime in general, proved even more dramatic. Philadelphia saw the number of murders go down 35% in the last twelve months; Baltimore registered a 30% reduction in homicides. Columbus, Ohio reported a decline of 58% in murders, while Boston reported just two killings in the year just passed, compared to 11 a year earlier.

Jeff Asher, co-founder of a criminal justice consulting firm, noted, “There’s just a ton of places that you can point to that are showing widespread, very positive trends. Nationally, you’re seeing a very similar situation to what you saw in the mid-to-late ’90s. But it’s potentially even larger in terms of the percentages and numbers of these drops.”

Nearly everywhere, the murder surge connected to the dark years of the COVID-19 pandemic has been dramatically reversed, or at least significantly slowed.

And this improvement has occurred simultaneously with a tidal wave of unauthorized immigration that many worried citizens characterize as a deadly and dangerous invasion. In other words, politicians blame migrants for a horrifying rise in crime at the conclusion of a two-year period when crime rates have actually gone down sharply.

Even more striking, during the peak years of the COVID crisis (2019-2021) the immigration levels, both legal and illegal, went down significantly due to public health and economic factors, at the same time that murder rates went up significantly as the result of financial disruptions and the strident anti-police reactions to George Floyd’s death in 2020.

In other words, despite the insistence to the contrary of pandering politicos, the connection between illegal immigration and rising crime is hardly cause and effect; if anything, history suggests that high levels of immigration usually result in lower levels of crime. Moreover, major cities closest to the Southern border like El Paso and San Diego, have some of the lowest rates of crime, not the highest.

In February, the Washington Post featured a major analysis by “Fact Checker” Glen Kessler under the heading “THE TRUTH ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND CRIME.” Among other sources, he cites a major study from 2023 by professors at the University of California at Irvine and William and Mary, that indicates that “communities with more immigration tend to have less crime, especially violent crimes like homicide. They also found that immigrants are less involved in crime as both offenders and victims, compared with the native-born…”

Another study from 2015 by the Migration Policy Institute estimated that only a small percentage of undocumented immigrants—3%—had felony convictions. That compares to the 8% with felony convictions of the US population at large. Even the Center for Immigration Studies, noted as immigration “hard-liners” who support tighter restrictions and tighter limits on migrants entering the U.S., acknowledges that a definitive Texas study shows undocumented immigrants have a lower homicide conviction rate (2.4 per 100,000) compared to native-born Americans (2.8 per 100,00). Legal immigrants have by far the lowest homicide conviction rate—1.1 per 100,000.

None of these perspectives argue for the federal government to continue the lax and ineffective enforcement of immigration laws, or to avoid the necessary task of tightening security at our Southern border.  There are many reasons to prevent unauthorized migrants from entering the country, including the the healthy and necessary respect for law and order, the potential over-burdening of institutions like schools, hospitals and other public resources, and more. But conjuring a fictitious “migrant crime wave” at a moment of reduced criminality and improving public safety, only pollutes and confuses the national conversation about needed efforts toward reform.

Instead, we should acknowledge and celebrate the current positive indications of nationwide reductions in crime, without pretending that the current high levels of immigration play a decisive role in either extending or undermining these benevolent trends.