Crime Rates, Not the Number of Crimes, Are a Better Way to Judge Immigrant Criminality

Yesterday, the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs held a hearing titled "How the Border Crisis Impacts Public Safety." My colleague David Bier testified. One of the other witnesses was Ken Cuccinelli, former attorney general of Virginia, who also served in various capacities at the Department of Homeland Security. Cuccinelli submitted written testimony about the impact of illegal immigration on crime, stating, "Crime rates do not matter, only the raw number of crimes and the harm caused by those crimes." Cuccinelli was trying to refute Cato Institute research that finds illegal immigrants and legal immigrants have a consistently lower criminal conviction rate and incarceration rate than native- born Americans by channeling a common refrain I hear on Twitter and from immigration restrictionists: 'Some immigrants commit crimes, and those crimes would not have occurred in the United States if the immigrants weren't here.' In an obtuse way, they have a point. But it's a trivial point because some individuals in any large population will always commit some crimes. Even small populations of people disinclined to commit crimes contain a few individuals who occasionally do, such as female biology professors.