Immigrants more law abiding than native borns like Trump

Vox - Billionaire Donald Trump recently claimed that Mexican immigrants are rapists and criminals. But a new report has found that the opposite is true: Immigrants — both legal and unauthorized — are actually less likely to commit crime than native-born Americans.
The report from the Immigration Policy Center, an advocacy group, draws from federal data and various empirical studies. The analysis isn't perfect, because it doesn't always differentiate between legal and unauthorized immigrants. But it should give Trump and others pause before they make eccentric claims that paint Latino Americans with a broad brush.

Native-born Americans are much more likely to be incarcerated than immigrants

Immigration Policy Center

The Immigration Policy Center found that immigrant men from Mexico, El Salvador, and Guatemala ages 18 to 39 and without a high school diploma — those who make up a bulk of the unauthorized immigrant population and would be most prone to commit crime — are incarcerated at much lower rates than native-born American men of the same age and education level. This suggests that immigrants — both unauthorized and legal — are committing much less crime.

The analysis found this has held up for decades. In 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010, native-born Americans ages 18 to 39 were two to five times more likely to be in jail or prison than immigrants of the same age.

In a review of the research, the Immigration Policy Center cited multiple studies that found immigrants aren't more prone to commit crime. For example, a 2013 study found that "immigrants to the US are less likely to engage in violent or nonviolent antisocial behaviors than native-born Americans. Notably, native-born Americans were approximately four times more likely to report violent behavior than Asian and African immigrants and three times more likely than immigrants from Latin America."

Since the 1990s, more unauthorized immigrants came to the US — and crime rates dropped

As the number of immigrants — unauthorized and otherwise — increased in the US, crime fell precipitously across the country. And major immigrant "gateways" — such as El Paso, San Antonio, San Diego, and Austin — have seen big crime drops along with the rest of the country, according to the Immigration Policy Center report.

Now, immigration isn't necessarily the cause of the US crime drop — criminologists point to many, many reasons for the decline, and some are still being studied and debated to this day.

But some criminologists believe immigration helped. John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute's Justice Policy Center, previously told me that upwardly mobile immigrants (and gentrifiers) help create more prosperous economic environments — because they don't push older residents out of inner-city neighborhoods, but instead create more integrated, economically healthier areas. These stronger economies then help drive down crime.

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