Completely Bogus Fact-Check By the Associated Press attacking the CPRC’s Research
The Associated Press has a fact-check attacking a video that Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens on illegal aliens in the US that referenced the CPRC’s research.
CLAIM: Immigrants living in the U.S. illegally who come from Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador are “twice as likely” to commit crime than U.S.-born citizens.
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The Facts: . . . “It is false. Very false and troubling,” said Denise Gilman, director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. “There is a lot of empirical evidence that goes in the other direction.” . . .
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When asked to provide evidence for Kirk’s claim, Andrew Kolvet, a spokesperson for Turning Point USA, pointed to a 2018 news story about a report from the Crime Prevention Research Center, a conservative nonprofit, which found that immigrants between the ages of 15 and 35 who were living in the U.S. illegally accounted for almost 8% of Arizona’s prison population, despite being around 2% of the state’s population. The report also concluded that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are significantly more likely to be convicted of crime than “other Arizonans.”
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But the paper has “significant problems,” Gilman wrote in an email to the AP. She noted that the paper was not peer-reviewed and that the author failed to account for prosecutors’ potential bias against immigrants.
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“There is no effort to control for prosecutorial predilection towards prosecuting undocumented persons or migrants,” Gilman wrote. “In other words, it may well be that migrants do not commit more crimes but are instead prosecuted at higher rates.”
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“The whole methodology is very questionable and the basic explanation of the method is not sound,” Ingrid Eagly, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote in an email to the AP.
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Castañeda wrote in an email to the AP that the finding that immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are overrepresented in Arizona’s prisons “does not mean they were committing more or worse crime. . . .
Josh Kelety, “Video spreads false claims about immigrants,” Associated Press, May 11, 2022.
Is the game by the Associated Press that they can find someone who agrees with them and disagrees with whoever they want criticized?
There are two criticisms of the CPRC’s study: 1) That the rest of the research shows that illegal immigrants are very law-abiding and 2) that the CPRC result is contaminated by a general bias against immigrants.
Here is a discussion from the CPRC’s study evaluating other research on this topic.
Past research often examines rough correlations between immigration and various types of crime rates, with the literature divided between those who claim immigrants are more law-abiding and those who find no difference (e.g., Stowell et al, 2009, p. 895 for a survey). Others emphasize more recent studies that only find a benefit in terms of lower crime (Landgrave and Nowrasteh, 2017 and Waters and Pineau, 2017, p. 326- 330). No previous research over at least the last two decades has found higher crime rates for undocumented immigrants (Hagan and Palloni (1998) using survey data for prisoners in El Paso and San Diego).
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Many use simple, cross-sectional analysis to see whether areas with higher immigrant populations have higher crime rates. Others use a purely time series approach. Rumbaut and Ewing (2007) and Ewing et al. (2015) look at the United States as a whole and note that crime has decreased since 1990 as immigration has increased. They also look at incarceration rates by national origin and nativity. Stowell et al (2009) look at how crime rates change in those metropolitan areas with the fastest growth in immigrants.
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There are many different statistical problems with these primitive studies. But there are also a number of data issues that make them unable to infer anything about the behavior of undocumented immigrants. Lumping together documented and undocumented immigrants (and often naturalized citizens) may mean combining very different groups of people. As we will see, documented and undocumented immigrants have vastly different incarceration rates in Arizona. Undocumented immigrants have the highest rates, whereas documented immigrants actually have lower rates than do U.S. citizens. Putting all of these different types of people together, it is impossible to infer anything about how law-abiding undocumented immigrants are.
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Other studies depend heavily on self-reported information, asking individuals about their criminal histories and even whether they were born in the United States (e.g., Butcher and Piehl, 2007; Ewing et al., 2015; Hickman and Suttorp, 2008; Salas-Wright et al. 2017). Undocumented immigrants may not want to admit that they have been in prison, fearing that their criminal record and illegal status will make them prime candidates for deportation. They may also lie about whether they were born in the United States. There is no real benefit to undocumented immigrants responding truthfully to the government or private surveyors.
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The data here were collected for a report put together for the Arizona Prosecuting Attorneys’ Advisory Council (APAAC) (Lott and Wang, 2017). Beyond what criminals are currently incarcerated for, the data have remarkable information on criminal history, gang membership, whether they are identified as particularly dangerous, and citizenship status. Citizenship status was determined by what was listed in the pre-sentencing report, and prosecutors and others knew it even much earlier in the case than that. This is key because documented immigrants aren’t labeled as “non-U.S. citizen, deportable” until after they have been sentenced. In contrast, illegal aliens are labeled that way prior to sentencing.
As to the potential bias against immigrants, that also doesn’t make sense because unlike other studies that lump together legal and illegal immigrants, this studies examines the differences between US citizens, undocumented immigrants, and legal permanent residents. The CRPC research finds that while legal immigrants tend to be very law-abiding, undocumented immigrants have much higher rates of conviction and imprisonment. If there was a general bias against immigrants, you wouldn’t observe that stark difference.
Undocumented immigrants’ share of the Arizona population appears to have varied considerably over time. Using the U.S. Census, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) estimated that undocumented immigrants made up 2.4%, 6.39%, and 5.48% of the state’s population in 1990, 2000, and 2010, respectively (Figure 1). A Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data estimated a population share of 4.8% in 2014, and thus a 25-year average of 5.25% from 1990 to 2014. If we use the 1990 estimate for 1985-1989, and the 2014 estimate for 2015-2017, then Arizona’s 33-year average from 1985-2017 would be about 4.8% (though the trends suggest that this is an overestimate). . . .
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The 12.6% share of 2014 incarcerations implies that undocumented immigrants were convicted at least 163% more often than Arizonans in general. The tight confidence interval associated with the estimated share of undocumented immigrants in the population would have to be over 52 standard deviations higher than it is for undocumented immigrants to be incarcerated at the same rate as the average Arizonan. . . .
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In comparison, documented immigrants (Legal Permanent Residents) were extremely law-abiding. They made up only 1.5% of the prison population in 2014, while a rough estimate indicates that their share of the state’s population is about 3.9%. . . .
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