Corporate media and Democrat officials continue parroting the claim that illegal migrants commit violent crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens. The assertion is meant to push for an open southern border, even as incidences of illegal migrants raping, assaulting, running over, and brutally murdering American children pile up.
But the claim ignores the fact that all illegal migrant crime is inherently preventable and hinges on misrepresenting studies in ways that mislead and deceive the public.
Media Misrepresents Research
Examples in the media are numerous. A CNN article published shortly after an illegal migrant attacked and killed nursing student Laken Riley in February claimed public perception of illegal migrant crime “flies in the face of years of studies looking at what actually happened after immigrants came to communities across the US.”
“Many researchers crunching the numbers have found there’s no connection between immigration and crime,” wrote CNN Senior Writer Catherine E. Shoichet. “Some have even found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the US.”
The article directs readers to a previous CNN article citing a study from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. The study, conducted by policy scholar Alex Nowrasteh, found that illegal immigrants were arrested for and convicted of violent crimes less than native-born Americans in Texas in 2015. The study did not evaluate actual offenses, nor did it rule out any connection between immigration and crime, as Shoichet claimed.
Research has shown, however, that arrest and conviction data are not adequate proxies for how often crime
