Small Things Count

I don’t like outsiders coming into California and telling me what’s wrong with my state, especially when they haven’t done their homework.  I’m galled by Donald Trump’s telling us how bad the violent crime is in California and attributing it to our immigrants.

According to the CATO Institute’s Immigration and Crime–What the Research Says, “Between years 2000 and 2005, California cities with large inflows of recent immigrants tended have lower violent crimes rates [emphasis mine] and the findings are statistically significant.  During the same time period, there is no statistically significant relationship between immigration and property crime.”

The American Immigration Council  says this in The Criminalization of Immigration in the United States: “For more than a century, innumerable studies have confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent crime and property crime [emphasis mine]. This holds true for both legal immigrants and the unauthorized, regardless of their country of origin or level of education.”

CNN reported in Immigrants and Crime–Crunching the Numbers that “numerous studies going back more than a century have shown that immigrants—regardless of nationality or legal status—are less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes or to be incarcerated. A new report from the Immigration Policy Center notes that while the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. more than tripled between 1990 and 2013 to more than 11.2 million, ‘FBI data indicate that the violent crime rate declined 48%—which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41%, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary.’”

A GAO (U.S. Government Accountability Office) report shows an increase in immigrants arrested, but for immigration violations, traffic violations, and drugs, not for violent crimes.  “Based on our random sample, GAO estimates that the criminal aliens had an average of 7 arrests, 65 percent were arrested at least once for an immigration offense, and about 50 percent were arrested at least once for a drug offense. Immigration, drugs, and traffic violations accounted for about 50 percent of arrest offenses. About 90 percent of the criminal aliens sentenced in federal court in fiscal year 2009 (the most recently available data) were convicted of immigration and drug-related offenses.”

I did my own bit of homework, all by myself.  Trump and others like him have teams of people to do it for them.  But they don’t care about the truth; they care only about sound-bites and riling us up against each other so they can jump in and say, “Trust me. I’ll save you.”

Go away and leave California alone.  We don’t need your type of “saving”!