Ann Coulter on those Immigrant crime studies

Ann Coulter: Every Pro-Immigration Claim is a Lie

In the wake of Kate Steinle's murder at the hands of an illegal immigrant, mass immigration advocates have begun a campaign of lies in defense of their cheap labor. "Studies show," they say, that immigrants commit LESS crime than the native population.

Inasmuch as the vast majority of post-1970 immigrants -- legal immigrants -- are poor, non-white and come from countries with far worse crime rates than our own, that's at least counterintuitive.

The main evidence cited in support of the claim that immigrants commit less crime than Americans is a moronic point about cities with a lot of immigrants seeming to have low crime rates. Check and mate, Mr. Trump! ...

Reason magazine boasts, for example, that El Paso, Texas, has a large Hispanic population and yet El Paso "is among the safest big cities in America."

In fact, however, El Paso's "safe city" ranking is based on an outdated FBI crime index that includes only eight crime categories, excluding such crimes as drunk driving, narcotics offenses and weapons violations. When the FBI's more complete crime index is used, El Paso has a higher crime rate than the national average.

The reason crime has plummeted around the nation in the last few decades is aggressive policing, increased prison sentences and the expansion of concealed carry permits. (All policies currently being jettisoned by liberals.)

According to The New York Times, the drop in crime in New York City during Giuliani's first two years as mayor aloneaccounted for 35 percent of the reduction in the national crime rate.

The second main line of attack on the idea that immigrants are committing prodigious amounts of crime are the apocryphal "studies."

The two researchers whose work is cited over and over again for the proposition that immigrants are less criminal than Americans are Alex Piquero, criminology professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and Bianca Bersani, sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Pew cites their studies -- and everyone in the media cites Pew, leading to headlines like these:

"UT Dallas prof finds immigrant kids less likely to commit serious crimes, re-offend" -- The Dallas Morning News

"UMass Boston Prof: Stereotype of 'Criminal Immigrant' Doesn't Hold Up" -- Targeted News Service

"Surprise! Donald Trump is wrong about immigrants and crime" -- The Washington Post

Curiously, we are never shown the actual studies, but simply told -- with some heat -- "studies show!"

I looked up some of these alleged studies this weekend. They're all hidden behind ridiculous Internet paywalls. I was often only the sixth person to read them.

It turns out that neither Piquero nor Bersani compared immigrant crime to "the overall population" -- as the British Guardian recently claimed in an article purporting to prove Donald Trump wrong. Rather, they compare immigrants' crime rate to the crime rate of America's most criminally inclined subgroups.

Thus, for example, once you get past the paywall, you will find that Piquero and Bersani's joint study, "Comparing Patterns and Predictors of Immigrant Offending Among a Sample of Adjudicated Youth," used as its base group "adolescents who were found guilty of a serious offense."

THAT'S NOT A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE OF AMERICANS! It's a representative sample of teenagers who are convicted criminals.

Read the whole thing.