Are illegal immigrants less likely to commit crimes?

I have discussed this topic of whether illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than natural born Americans and legal immigrants (the latter are deported if they commit a crime) many times. Even many Christians like to say that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than legal residents and citizens. I thought it might be a good idea to link to some evidence from RealClearInvestigations.

It says:

An analysis of the available statistics by RealClearInvestigations suggests that the crime rate of noncitizens is vastly understated. A separate RCI analysis based on estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) suggests that crime by illegal aliens who entered the U.S. by July 21, 2024 cost the country some $166.5 billion. These criminals disproportionately entered the U.S. during the Biden administration.

Even if you are not the victim of a crime by an illegal immigrant, we all have to pay for law enforcement and property damage. We all have to pay for higher insurance rates. We all have to pay for criminal courts and prisons.

Here are two more ways that the numbers of offenses are not counted accurately.

Numbers of past offenses not being counted:

The data on migrants who have been processed also understates the problem. Criminals rarely commit just one crime. For example, from 1990 to 2002, in the 75 most populous U.S. counties, 70% of those convicted of a violent felony had a prior arrest, and 56% had a prior criminal conviction. In 2023 in Washington, D.C., the average homicide suspect had been arrested 11 times before committing a homicide. Data for 30 states shows that 60.1% of criminals released from prison in 2005 had been arrested again within two years, and 73.5% had been arrested within four years. The ICE data set provides a single entry for each individual.

Numbers of people who are not arrested / convicted not being counted:

Most violent crimes don’t result in an arrest, so looking at arrests or convictions in these other countries will underestimate whether illegal aliens are criminals. Across all U.S. cities in 2022, only 35.2% of violent crimes resulted in an arrest. While 50.6% of murders resulted in an arrest, just 24.1% of rapes produced an arrest, 22.7% of robberies, and 39.9% of aggravated assaults.

On Tuesday night, I watched a video of a TikTok that had gone viral, in which a white leftist young woman was talking about the murder of Laken Riley. She was complaining about why the news had to report that the accused murderer was an illegal immigrant. And she went on to say that white males were the most dangerous people in America, because they committed the most crimes. I just thought it was interesting to think that many people are voting for lax border security, thinking that it will not make them less safe. This is even after we’ve seen young women like Laken Riley, Lizbeth Medina, Jocelyn Nungaray and Rachel Morin suffer violence and even death at the hands of illegal immigrants.

I can understand that saying things like what this young leftist woman was saying is a good way to virtue signal. But the real-world effect of open borders is that a lot of innocent people – people who pay taxes in order to fund law enforcement – will get hurt, raped and even killed. Young women who vote for leftist policies are actually causing harm to other young women, even as they drone on about the patriarchy and how much they fear toxic masculinity. You really have to wonder whether they learn anything at all about how the world really works in college.