The Best and Brightest

by Neil Munro

DACA-aged illegals commit crimes at twice the rate of young Americans, says a comprehensive summary of crimes and convictions in Arizona during the past 32 years.

The report punctures claims by pro-amnesty advocates that young ‘dreamer’ illegals are vital to U.S. industry and civic life, and indicate that any amnesty will ensure that many more crimes — including murders and rapes — will be inflicted against Americans and legal immigrants, including Hispanics and blacks.

The report says:

Unfortunately, if the goal of DACA is to give citizenship to a particularly law-abiding group of undocumented immigrants, it is accomplishing the opposite of what was intended. As Table 8 shows, DACA age eligible undocumented immigrants are 250% more likely to be convicted of crimes than their share of the population. Those too old for DACA status are convicted at a relatively low rates (45.7% more than their share of the Arizona population).

The summary of the report, titled “Undocumented Immigrants, U.S. Citizens, and Convicted Criminals in Arizona,” says:

Using newly released detailed data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017, we are able to separate non-U.S. citizens by whether they are illegal or legal residents. These data do not rely on self-reporting by criminals. Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, more likely to be classified as dangerous, and 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens …

If undocumented immigrants committed crime nationally as they do in Arizona, in 2016 they would have been responsible for over 1,000 more murders, 5,200 rapes, 8,900 robberies, 25,300 aggravated assaults, and 26,900 burglaries.

The report was prepared by John R. Lott Jr. at the Crime Prevention Research Center, in Alexandria, Va. He told Breitbart News:

The data there shows the convictions for everybody who entered the prisons system from January 1985 through June of this last year … It just shows that certain groups are convicted at much higher rates than their share of the population … [roughly 75 percent] of the crime committed by undocumented immigrants or illegal aliens is committed by those who are 15 to 35 years of age.

Legal immigrants are very different from illegal immigrants, he said.

Illegal immigrants are being convicted at very high rates compared to their share of the population. Legal immigrants appear to be fairly law-abiding, and are convicted at low rates compared to their share of the population.

The database used for the report does not describe the race or ethnic identity of the victim, but national data shows that most victims are part of the same group as their criminals, he said. Lott added:

What tends to happen across all the different racial groups is that criminals are of the similar race as the victim … the crime literature [shows] that victims tend to be similar to the perpetrators of the crimes … Obviously, a larger share of the victims will also be undocumented illegal aliens.

Unsurprisingly, polls show that many legal immigrants want stronger border security. In 2014, for example, a pro-amnesty poll funded by Mark Zuckerberg showed that 78 percent of Hispanic respondents support “substantially increasing security among US-Mexican border.”

Asked to rebut likely criticisms of the crime report, Lott said he had seen few criticisms so far. “I don’t know what people will say — it seems like a straightforward set of numbers,” he said.

However, he noted that the report does not include any data about unreported crimes. “That raises the possibility that a lot of crimes are not reported … looking at convictions might provide you with an underestimate of the crime these illegals have committed.”

Lott’s report sheds more light on the 3.25 million ‘dreamers’ who would be the beneficiaries of an amnesty now being pushed by Democratic politicians, business-first GOP legislators, and cheap-labor business groups.

Pro-amnesty groups frequently portray the young illegals as a gain for the American society. Illegal migrants “embody the best of our nation,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the Democrats in the House of Representatives, said in December.

But that pitch is contradicted by Lott’s crime data, by the self-reported earnings of the migrants, their very poor education [less than 2 percent have college degrees) and by the very beneficial economic impact for Americans of excluding illegal immigrants.

In Arizona, for example, labor and immigration reforms began in 2004, and the state’s population of roughly 450,000 illegals gradually dropped by roughly 180,000 people from 2007 to 2012. Because of the 40 percent drop in illegal labor, the wages earned by Americans rose significantly, said a subsequent study by Moody’s Analytics. According to the Wall Street Journal report on the study:

The median income of low-skilled whites who did manage to get jobs rose about 6% during that period, the economists estimate … wages rose about 15% for Arizona farmworkers and about 10% for construction between 2010 and 2014 … Some employers say their need for workers has increased since then, leading them to boost wages more rapidly and crimping their ability to expand … graduates [at a federal job-training center] now often mull two or three jobs offers from construction firms and occasionally start at $14.65 an hour instead of $10 … At DTR Landscape Development LLC, the firm’s president, Dick Roberts, says he has increased his starting wage by 60% to $14.50 an hour because he is having trouble finding reliable workers.