El Pipe (Insert Phallic Symbol Comment Here)
The more I learn about immigration, the more incomprehensible the standard conservative–and occasionally liberal–talking points become. Immigrants are criminals. Immigration is bad for the U.S. Immigration breaks down “family values.” Fred Thompson vocalized the most paranoid claims at the Prescott Bush Awards Dinner (in 2007, I think): “Twelve million illegal immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women, and children around the world.”
I don’t even know where to start with that. Immigration = violence? Immigration = terrorism? Illegal immigration = terrorism? And haven’t our terrorists generally been (1) legal immigrants or (2) good ol’ American citizens? Maybe we should have learned our lesson about letting actors and lawyers run our nation. Should have.
Anyway, Sampson distills — quite readably and with pretty graphs — a lot of hard, empirical research about immigration and crime. We don’t know everything about these phenomena yet (which means crackpots like Bill O’Reilly know even less, despite their claims). But everything we do know suggests some things that are exactly the opposite of the common “wisdom.” For instance:
- The national trends in violence for half a century have been the reverse of immigration trends. That is, higher immigration has corresponded to lower national violence, and vice-versa.
- Latinos are, in general, less violent than American Blacks or Whites, when their socioeconomic status is accounted for.
- For many decades now, immigrant neighborhoods and communities are less violent than non-immigrant areas.
- Illegal immigrants are, as far as we can tell, also less violent than non-immigrant Americans.
Sampson speculates, given the consistently lower rates of violence among immigrants (both legal and illegal) that the 25-year crime decline in the U.S. might be partly due to the influx of less-violent immigrant populations. The author goes on to point out some painful ironies:
- The U.S. has been a fairly violent place for three centuries. Immigrants may well “dilute the American identity,” but that might be a good thing.
- The historical violence of the U.S. is ascribed by many researchers largely to the influence of White immigrants, especially from Ireland and Scotland, during the past couple of centuries.
- The data show that second-generation immigrants are more violent than first-generation, and the third generation shows violence levels almost equal with the Americans who have lived here since forever.
Apparently, becoming an American means learning to be as violent as the rest of us, even if it takes three or four generations to get there.
“Is it not the loftiness of thy vineyard..?” Bring on the branches. Graft them in.
2 comments ↓
So, I’m really not sure where to begin. I love that the intellectual crowd thinks that because they can conjure up some hypothesis based on a specific data set that they think that the rest of us are just morons that need to be led by the nose.
I guess that just because this Harvard guy, Sampson, thinks that having illegal an immigrant, or 12 million of them, come into our country is good for us because it dilutes our violent tendencies then we just need to look the other way. Oh where to start. I guess ILLEGAL would be a good place.
Perhapse these braniacs might think up a better solution to the problem, because it is one. The argument that we should ignore it because it dulls the sharp edges is dillusional at best and doesn’t even address the real issue. They are breaking our laws. If it is so important for them to be here then perhapse the solution would lie in changing the laws to allow for more of them to come in legally (Not to mention that the USA already allows more legal immigration than any country in the world and more than most others combined). That of course can be done, but it is obviously in the best interet of a lot of people to not change the situation so the problem is talked about and debated until someone that has nothing better to do than spend the public dime on research that has, at best, only minimal relevance to the situation devises a solution that is neither helpful or interesting.
Let’s try and do something useful for once.
Welcome, anonymous visitor. I think you have misunderstood some of what I wrote. I’m not advocating a simple amnesty program. I’m saying that there are certain people out there, on the Right as well as the Left, who apparently need to believe in nightmare fairy tales in order to keep public support for their policies. The facts (as well as we know them) are strikingly at odds with the reasons these people give for their policies and invective. Maybe we should continue to limit immigration. That’s a possibility. Of course we should not ignore enforcement of laws that we have created. But if we need to close our eyes to the best information available in order to “hold the course,” there’s something wrong.
Yes, I agree the research is not totally conclusive, and based on a limited sample. This is sort of the definition of research, actually. As you note, laws are in a constant process of change and adjustment, and should be adjusted if they’re not serving useful ends. If taxation were killing the economy, would you say that it was ridiculous to consider revising tax laws? If current copyright/patent law were radically reducing innovation in the sciences, would you say it was crazy to question these laws?
There is a serious problem, I think, in saying “research is bunk” whenever we disagree with its results. We go with our gut instinct and what we saw on TV this week. That’s got to be more valid that any “data” collected by “experts” who spend their lives studying the “issues,” right? Obviously, as a scientist, I believe data. It’s always limited. It’s never conclusive, but it’s really, really difficult to come up with a situation in which “common sense” (or TV news) has come up with a more accurate appraisal of any issue than the majority of empirical scientific studies on that issue.
Maybe the problem is that “science” and “data” never give you a 100% certain “yes” or “no” on an issue, and most people feel uncomfortable without absolute answers. Gut feelings and conformity to our peer group (including TV & radio & internet peer groups), on the other hand, can make us feel very certain about things. The problem is that our certainty will often be wrong. And so will the gut feelings of many of the 300 million other Americans. And they’ll be wrong in different ways.
Yes, I’m questioning current immigration policy, because the best evidence suggests that it’s out of proportion to the threat illegal immigration presents. The vast majority of illegal immigrants are criminals *only* because of the crime of coming to this country without permission. If our best information on these issues changes, then my view of those realities will change, too.
Research cannot (usually, anyway) tell us about morality. I agree that current laws should be enforced. We should not simply “look the other way”. However, “ILLEGAL” isn’t a magic word meaning we should dump a huge percentage of our national budget on enforcement of this particular issue. Bureaucrats need to make tough decisions about where to spend our limited money. Do you drop a huge chunk of it on preventing mostly-nonviolent, nonthreatening, non-tax-money-using people from coming into our country, or do you spend more on education, healthcare, improving our crumbling infrastructure, keeping Social Security from collapsing, or a hundred other things? There are plenty of laws we really don’t spend much money enforcing even though they represent immoral behavior. Parking infractions, small-scale white-collar crime, foreign dignitaries getting speeding tickets, etc.
Have you given a look, lately, to what the cost of this Border Wall is going to be? The billions (or even tens or hundreds of billions) of dollars it may end up costing? The environmental and agricultural damage it’s going to inflict? The thousands (or tens of thousands) of tax-paying citizens whose land is being taken by Homeland Security without due process? The costs in lost American business dollars? The cost in negative diplomacy? (links available on request). Is it all worth it, if most of the people it will stop are not, in fact, violent or criminally-minded, but are actually family men coming to a country with opportunity, to make a living for their families back home in a nation struggling to escape its third-world status?
Yes, if someone has broken a law, then they are, by definition, a criminal. But murderers and rapists are not the same as tax evaders and jaywalkers. Or border-crossers.
To reiterate, I think our immigration policy needs an overhaul. Personally, I kind of liked Bush’s Guest Worker program, and was sad to see it shot down by both Right and Left.
More importantly, we Americans sometimes need our heads adjusted. If the only way we can support our policies is through maintaining a bigoted, false view of another group of people, then there’s something seriously wrong. We need to get in the habit of taking a hard look at the facts (from the best available sources, not just those that we already know we’re going to agree with), change our mindsets accordingly, and then decide how to apply our morality to the issues. In that order.
BTW, if you’re going to discard empirical research out of hand, you need to provide something else on which to base our ideas of reality. And it should be something better.
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