Canard about illegals committing fewer crimes than other Americans gets blown apart from DHS data

 

Monica Showalter

A common leftist canard, promoted by activists, foundations, Democrat politicians, Catholic bishops, Episcopalian bishops, and other open-borders advocates, holds that illegal aliens commit way fewer crimes than ordinary Americans.

It's sugar-coated garbage, and not just because we look around and confront the evidence of our own eyes, or consider the incentive an open border offers to criminals who can't get into the states otherwise.

Writing at the New York Post, John Lott has come up with a doozy of a report showing how data are skewed to conceal the fact that illegals commit at least three times the crime of ordinary Americans and those legally present, putting paid to the rubbish that crime from illegals is minimal, any illegal-alien crime in the news is just an aberration, and anyone thinking otherwise is just a MAGA racist xenophobe.

Lott points out that the baseline mistake for these claims is that official data lumps legal and illegal immigrants together. Separate them out, and vetted legal immigrants commit very few crimes -- but illegals commit way more than they are given 'credit' for by the open-borders lobby.

Citing DHS data for New York alone, Lott writes:

The DHS data gives us a handy metric to calculate relative rates of criminality.

Altogether, roughly 50,803 people are incarcerated in New York’s prison and jail systems: about 32,469 in the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and another 18,334  in the state’s city and county jails.

The 7,113 illegal aliens currently incarcerated thus make up 14% of New York’s total inmate population — and this share is likely an underestimate, because the state doesn’t actively identify immigration status.

But assume the DHS data is correct, and illegals make up 14% of incarcerated individuals in New York.

 

New York is estimated to have between 676,000 and 825,000 illegal aliens out of a total state population of 19.99 million — meaning illegal immigrants make up only 3.4% to 4.15% of the state’s population. That means they are overrepresented in the state’s prisons and jails by at least 3.4 times. And even if the population estimate undercounts the number of illegal aliens in New York, and the true number present is two to three times higher, illegal aliens would still be massively overrepresented among New York’s convicted and accused criminals.

Lott points to some factors that likely mean the proportion of illegals committing crimes compared to the rest of the population is even higher than the mere threefold number:

One, once illegals are picked up by lawmen for committing crimes, they are often deported before facing charges or any jail time, which leaves them out of the statistics. Alternatively, illegals are deported before completing their terms.

This implies that the three-times-the-average numbers are likely even higher because these numbers don't show up in crime data.

Lott doesn't mention it, but other factors that likely skew the data away from illegals showing up in it are district attorneys who refuse to prosecute violent crime, cops who retire at their desks, prosecutors who reduce felonies to misdemeanors to prevent illegals' deportation, which happens a lot. There are also judges out there vacating convictions to help the illegals remain in the country. All of that skews crime data to suggest that the crimes never happened, which, to the victims, is quite an insult.

And it puts paid to rest the ridiculous claims from the NGOs, the bishops, the Democrat hacks, and the mainstream media that illegals commit very few crimes.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/canard_about_illegals_committing_fewer_crimes_than_other_americans_gets_blown_apart_from_dhs_data.html