Sharyl: Based on the numbers you've seen. What would you say is the true crime trend in this country, and it may be different for violent crimes and nonviolent crimes, but what do you see in the numbers?
Lott: Well, I think it's gone up tremendously violent crime during the Biden administration. I think it's gone up by about 43% since he's been president. And I think there are two reasons why the media wants to go and and kind of claim that it's going down. One is just unfortunately, I think probably just to help the Democrats on this. But I think the other thing, and a number of Democrats have made this explicit is they say, “Look, we’ve had many millions of illegals coming into the country and violent crime is falling.” And so they say “it can't be illegals causing more crime because crime is dropping over this period of time.”
Which brings us to another statistical trick, a flood of studies imply illegal immigrants are more law abiding than U.S. citizens.
The Marshall Project video clip: Our study found that immigrants are less likely to break the law than people born in the U.S.
But the studies often group legal immigrants in with illegal immigrants.
Lott: Now, what I've found, I did some work for the county prosecutors in Arizona a few years ago, is on their state prison system, is that you have big differences between legal and illegal immigrants. Legal immigrants seem to commit crimes at very low rates. Their share of the prison population was well below their share of the state population. Illegal immigrants though had a very high rate of crime, particularly very violent crime. Everything from kidnappings to murders compared to the general population that are there. Usually what happens in discussions is they mix the two together and so then they'll get a rate that could be roughly similar or maybe even slightly below what it is for native born Americans. And I think that's very misleading to lump those two groups together.
In fact, illegal immigrants have made up a disproportionately high number of prison inmates in America, indicating they commit far more serious crimes.
A decade ago, when illegal immigrants made up about one in thirty of the U.S. population, they accounted for a shocking one in four or five U.S. prison inmates, according to GAO. That included 4.9 million arrests for 7.5 million offenses including allegations of more than a million drug crimes, a half-million assaults, 133,800 sex offenses, 24,200 kidnappings, 33,300 homicide-related offenses, and 1,500 terrorism-related crimes. Nobody has tracked or updated the numbers since.
