UPDATED 11/18/16 AND 01/25/19

Some all-out “open the floodgates” champions of unfettered immigration have averred that a further influx of Central Americans won’t raise the rate of crime in the United States. (I can’t cite sources, but I’m sure that I’ve read such pronouncements in the pseudo-libertarian sector of the blogosphere.) I’ve even been guilty of giving aid and comfort to the pseudo-libertarian position by posting “Hispanics and Crime,” wherein I cite the work of La Griffe du Lion.

Griffe (if I may be familiar) says this in “Crime and the Hispanic Effect“:

It has been conjectured that the contribution of Hispanics to violent crime is on the point of advancing to the standing enjoyed by blacks. This, however, is not confirmed by our evidence, at least in our largest cities. Whoever thinks or has thought this to be so has come to this determination from evidence not directly related to what is happening on the street, but rather from incarceration records, court appearances or sentencing data. When crimes rather than criminals are counted, and the Hispanic effect is appropriately removed, the data show that violent crime rates for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites, though a bit higher for Hispanics, are in actual fact quite similar. As for blacks, their crime rate remains by any measure uniquely high.

And he has the numbers to prove it.

UPDATED BELOW — NEW NUMBERS, NEW CONCLUSIONS

For the sake of argument, I assume the following:

• Whites and Hispanics already in the U.S. commit crimes at the same rate.

• Hispanic immigrants (new ones, that is) are no more or less crime-prone than Hispanics already here.

It would seem to follow that Hispanic immigration hasn’t caused and won’t cause a rise in the rate at which crimes are committed in the U.S. But it ain’t necessarily so:

1. Crime rates are computed for a given population, with a given density and demographic makeup. Immigration changes the density and demographic makeup of a population.
2. If the rate of crime rises with the density of population, immigration will cause the rate of crime to rise, ceteris paribus.
3. If immigration leads to more interactions between resentful whites and Hispanics — as it almost surely will — the rate of white-on-Hispanic crime will rise further.
4. If immigration leads to more opportunities for Hispanics to attack whites because they’re white and to steal from more affluent persons (usually whites) — as it almost surely will — the rate of Hispanic-on-white crime will rise further.

My money’s on propositions 2, 3, and 4. Can anyone cite research pro or con?

Jared Taylor writes:

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) of the Department of Justice (DOJ) has released its annual “Crime in the US” report for 2015, and as has been widely noted, arrests for violent crime were up 3.7 percent over the previous year. Murder–up 11.8 percent–showed a sharper rise than at any time in the last 25 years. This rise in violent crime is a reversal of a steady, almost continuous decline since 1994….

…[S]ome agencies distinguished whites from Hispanics, but many just lumped Hispanics in with whites. The BJS reports the Hispanic/non-Hispanic information it gets from local agencies, but the information is so incomplete that most of the time it is impossible to calculate separate crime rates for whites and Hispanics. They have to be treated as a single group….

There are two groups–blacks and Asians–for whom BJS figures are clear and consistent. It is therefore possible to calculate accurate arrest rates for these groups and compare them to everyone else in the American population. The following table shows the multiples of arrest rates for blacks and Asians compared to non-blacks and non-Asians, respectively.

Black and Asian Multiples Compared to Non-Black and Non-Asian Offenders
	Black	Asian
Violent crime	3.7	0.26
Property crime	2.5	0.20

….

If we treat whites and Hispanics as a single group, we know that any individual black is 14 times more likely to kill a white or a Hispanic than the other way around. Again, the multiple would be higher if we were comparing blacks only to whites. We can also say with some confidence that a Hispanic is 2.7 times more likely than a white to kill a black person, and it appears that in this partial sample, more whites are killed by Hispanics (633) than by blacks (500). When a black is killed, 89.3 percent of killers are black. The BJS is mum on race in cases of murders involving multiple victims or killers.

The dramatic 11.8 percent rise in murders reported for 2015 has received a lot of attention, but is any particular racial group responsible for the increase? Both the BJS figures and press reports are silent on this question.

To arrive at the 11.8 percent increase, BJS–using data and estimates for the whole country and not simply passing on the partial data officially reported to it–says there were 15,192 murders in 2015, up from 13,594 in 2014. We can compare this increase to reported changes in the number of people of different races arrested for murder. BJS reported only 8,508 murder arrests for 2015. This low figure reflects not just that many murderers were not caught but also the limited reporting from police agencies that cover only 77.2 of the US population. But within this partial sample, there are race differences in the increase in arrests for murder. Compared to the total 2014 arrest figures, black arrests for 2015 were up by 123, Hispanic arrests by 62, “Others” (including American Indians and Pacific Islanders) by 54, and whites by only 39. Blacks therefore accounted for 44 percent of the increase from 2014 to 2015, Hispanics for 23 percent, and whites for only 14 percent. (These figures are based on BJS’s very partial reporting on Hispanics that certainly understates the number of Hispanic arrests for murder)….

A different calculation is possible based on BJS reports on race of murder offenders. Obviously the police don’t know the races of offenders they have not caught, and the proportion of “race unknown” rose from 29.7 percent in 2014 to 31.2 percent in 2015. For offenders whose race was known, the black increase was 447, as opposed a white increase of 221 and a Hispanic increase of 48. By this calculation as well, it is blacks–who were only 13.3 percent of the population–who accounted for the bulk of the rise in murders from 2014 to 2015.

There is an important BJS table that most people ignore. It is a supplemental table that lists arrests by race for criminals under the age of 18. This is one set of data for which the Hispanic/non-Hispanic data appear to be reliable, and the results are dramatic. The following table lists the multiple of the white arrest rate for blacks, Hispanics, and Asians for various crimes, along with the number of such crimes.

Multiples of White Arrest Rates for Offenders Under Age 18
	Number	Black X	Hisp X	Asian X
Violent crime	39,323	9.34	1.96	0.43
Property crime	160,234	4.28	1.11	0.41

….

Juveniles committed 601 murders, for example, and blacks were arrested for 361 of them, Hispanics for 118, and whites for only 116. When these figures are compared to the under-18 population (whites: 37.8 million, blacks: 9 million, Hispanics: 18.1 million, Asians: 3.5 million) black juveniles are arrested for murder at nearly 19 times the white rate, with Hispanics at 3.6 times the white rate. The arrest multiples for robbery are even more extreme: 35.8 times for blacks and 5 times for Hispanics. Whites were arrested for only 11.8 percent of the 14,142 robberies committed by juveniles in 2015….

Besides the serious deficiencies in federal crime data noted above, the 2015 National Crime Victimization Survey failed to report the data on the race of perpetrators. The NCVS survey of violent crime victims always asks for the race of the perpetrator, so the BJS has this information. However, since taking office, the Obama administration has almost never released it. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute managed to get and publish the data for 2013, but the 2015 data are still locked up somewhere at DOJ.

Our analysis of the 2013 data found that of the 650,000 acts of violence involving blacks and whites, blacks were the attackers 85 percent of the time, which meant any given black was 27 times more likely to attack a white than the other way around. It is no doubt because of these dramatic race differences that Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her predecessor Eric Holder have refused to release these data. [“Murders Shot Up in 2015,” American Renaissance, November 18, 2016]

It would seem to follow that Hispanic immigration has caused and will cause a rise in the rate at which crimes are committed in the U.S. Moreover,

1. Crime rates are computed for a given population, with a given density and demographic makeup. Immigration changes the density and demographic makeup of a population.
2. If the rate of crime rises with the density of population, immigration will cause the rate of crime to rise, ceteris paribus.
3. If immigration leads to more interactions between resentful whites and Hispanics — as it almost surely will — the rate of white-on-Hispanic crime will rise further.
4. If immigration leads to more opportunities for Hispanics to attack whites because they’re white and to steal from more affluent persons (usually whites) — as it almost surely will — the rate of Hispanic-on-white crime will rise further.

ADDED 01/25/19:

Guess what? I was right.

Pedro Gonzalez writes about

[Alex] Nowrasteh [who] claims to have “found that undocumented immigrants still committed crimes at a rate “32 percent below that of native-born Americans.”

Nowrasteh came to this conclusion by ignoring data and details that would have challenged his findings. Nowrasteh, moreover, engages in some sleight of hand. If we consider that, in California, for example, the number of U.S.-born children of illegal aliens is twice the entire population of Wyoming, the question becomes, who are those “native-born” criminals?

Barry Latzer clinches it:

Among all arrests for selected offenses over the period 2012 to 2017, illegal aliens were taken into custody for homicide (which includes murder and manslaughter) in numbers greater than their population size would predict. They accounted for nearly 10 percent of all apprehended killers, whereas, using the high-end DHS estimate, they make up 7.3 percent of the Texas population….

The crime of homicide provides the most accurate measure … because a much higher proportion of murders are solved by police—around 70 percent—than for any other crime; by contrast, fewer than 15 percent of property offenses lead to an arrest. As a result, we have much more accurate demographics for murderers than for, say, burglars. The indication that illegal aliens commit disproportionate numbers of murders is corroborated by crime rates, shaky though they may be, for 2014 and 2015—the two years for which we have population estimates from Pew and DHS. In 2014, Texas illegal-alien murder-arrest rates were 4.99 per 100,000—56 percent higher than the rates for all other apprehended murderers (3.2 per 100,000). In 2015, the rates were 35 percent higher for illegal aliens (4.2 per 100,000, versus 3.1 per 100,000).

Granted, neither the rates nor the percentages of illegal aliens arrested are overwhelmingly high. And the rates and percentages for other crimes that they commit are below those of the arrested citizen and legal-alien populations. Still, illegal aliens account for nearly 10 percent of the apprehended murderers in Texas, and over 39,000 of the annual arrests for crime overall. These figures are significant, reflecting crime in a single state with an outsize number of illegal aliens—a small part of the nationwide picture.

No amount of crime by those who enter this country unlawfully should be acceptable, because it is “extra” crime that wouldn’t occur if our border security were effective. [Emphasis added.]

Case closed.