Crimebusters Tip: Get Natives to Leave in Favor of Immigrants
Brian Doherty | July 20, 2007, 11:38am
Economist Bryan Caplan apologizes for falling into one of the very economic biases he says the general public falls for in his fascinating new book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies: The anti-foreign bias.
He had assumed, as do many Americans in this great land of immigrants, that immigrants represented a specially severe crime risk. A July 2007 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research set him straight. Here's how he explains it on his blog:
[D]espite their demographics, immigrants are drastically less criminal than native-born Americans. In fact, immigrants have one-fifth the incarceration rate of natives. Yes, natives are incarcerated at five times the rate of the foreign-born:
Using the 1980, 1990, and 2000 Censuses, we show that 18-40 year-old male immigrants have lower institutionalization rates than the native born in each year. The gap in these institutionalization rates widens over the decades, and by 2000 immigrants have institutionalization rates that are one-fifth of the native born.
Is this base statistical trickery? Not likely; these are raw numbers that anyone can double-check against the census. Could these results simply reflect the practice of deporting criminal aliens? Nope; our actual practice is to make immigrants serve their full sentence before expelling them. But how can we reconcile the facts with the demographics? [Study authors Kristin F.] Butcher and [Anne Morrison] Piehl show that given their demographics, we should expect immigrants to commit crimes at double the native rate. But for some reason(s), demographics yield a massive overprediction; immigrants commit crimes at one-tenth the expected rate given their demographics. Yes, if immigrants acted like otherwise similar natives, they were be ten times as criminal as they actually are.
Full text of an earlier version of the paper.
Mr. Nice Guy | July 21, 2007, 3:31am | #
"But I have to say, as eye-rolling right wing race cards go, claiming that someone is biased because they don't discuss legal and undocumented immigrants as if they were two different species is right up there with accusing Ted Kennedy and Pat Leahy of hating Catholics."
Joe, I think implying that those opposed to illegal immigration (or even legal) are necessarily engaged in right wing race cards is right up there with accusing Ted Kennedy and Pat Leahy of hating Catholics.
In my posts I said I thought, from a social science view, that it was weird to not break down, or at least mention, in an analysis, the differences between legal aliens and illegals. I mean, the paper takes time to discuss possible effects of being, say, a permanent legal vs. having a student visa. Why not discuss legal vs. illegal? It certainly strikes me as having some possible bearing on willingness to break the law (which is the variable the paper focuses on). Is only a racist capable of thining that it is possible that one who is willing to break border laws may also be more likely to break others, at least theoretically possible so it should be discussed in an analytical paper (if only to then refute with data)?
Think of the crappy ads Handgun Control used to put out that said something to the effect of "1 child dies every x hours from a handgun." It is of course meant to conjure visions of toddlers walking wobbily towards a 44 magnum. Of course "child" is defined as anyone under 18 (not unreasonable mind you), and a lot of these shootings involve teen-agers, including many gang bangers. It's not that this is not an unreasonable operationalization, nor that teen agers dying is not tragic, it's just that a good analysis breaks down these kinds of things. A 17 year old crip dying by handgun and a 2 year old who finds an unwatched handgun and shoots himself are both bad, but are still different enough to warrant a mention. Of course, if you want people to have the most deeply felt bad opinion of handguns, conflate the two. And if you want people to not dwell on illegal immigrant crime, add them to students and folks who have gone through a rigorous background check/bureaucratic process and give average numbers across the group. I think social science should be as disinterested as possible; let goofballs like us argue over the ethical conclusions. We need the premises that inform our conclusions to be the result of research as non-political as possible.
Interestingly, these institutional rate numbers are so low that the point would be well taken even if they did the analysis a little more, well, honestly by seperating the two (just as in the handgun case mentioned above). By the way, I'm using the handgun thing as an analogy, I'm not sure about the particulars.
