In February, El Cajon mayor and Republican congressional candidate Bill Wells sounded a familiar alarm on Fox News.
“There are a lot of people coming over and we have no idea who they are,” Wells said about migrants crossing the border illegally. “It stands to reason that many of them will be criminals.”
Such statements are not supported by crime statistics. Yet, leading up to November’s presidential election, politicians are using fear of “migrant crime” as a rationale for policies like mass deportations and shutting down the asylum system.
No one has beaten this drum louder than former President Donald Trump as he seeks a second term in the White House.
“Bad things are going to happen,” Trump told a cheering crowd at the Republican National Convention last month. “That’s why, to keep families safe, the Republican platform promises to launch the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”
It’s a centuries-old political narrative in the United States that has persisted because it works. More than half of all Americans believe that illegal immigration is linked to higher crime rates, according to a recent poll by Axios.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, President Joe Biden vowed to roll back harsh Trump-era immigration policies, and even criticized the Border Patrol’s treatment of migrants. But in this election cycle, Biden and the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, are taking a much harder stance
In June, Biden issued executive actions that effectively shut down asylum for people who cross the border illegally. And last week at the Democratic National Convention, Harris touted her “strong” border policies.
“Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades,” she said. “The Border Patrol endorsed it.”
Critics of that bipartisan bill note that it would make it much more difficult for people to seek asylum and increase border enforcement at a time when record numbers of migrants are dying along the southern border.
The stats say otherwise
All of this is happening while data from the FBI and Border Patrol — along with several academic studies — show people born in the United States are much more likely to be arrested and convicted of violent crimes.
Despite Wells' claim that, “we have no idea,” who undocumented migrants are, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents track migrants who have criminal convictions.
During the last fiscal year, agents arrested more than 15,000 migrants with criminal convictions trying to cross the border. Those arrests account for less than 1% of the more than 2.4 million migrant encounters at the southern border that year.
Critics of the “migrant crime” narrative point out that border cities are among the safest in the country. For example, San Diego has a lower violent crime rate to similar-sized cities like Dallas and San Antonio. And El Paso has lower rates than Boston or Denver, according to data from the FBI.
In 2024, both violent and property crime are down in San Diego — this is after Border Patrol agents have released thousands of migrants into the region. The same can be said for New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Los Angeles and San Francisco — other cities that attract large numbers of migrants.
“Crime in most of the large cities that migrants are going to is down,” said Aaron Riechlin-Melnick, policy director for American Immigration Council. “Not only is there no migrant crime wave, there’s not even a crime wave.”
The evidence refuting the notion of high migrant crime rates is overwhelming, said Alex Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian leaning Cato institute.
“The results of all the papers are pretty similar to each other in that they all find that native born Americans have the highest criminal conviction rates and arrest rates,” said Nowrasteh, who has written extensively about the issue. “Illegal immigrants have rates in the middle and then legal immigrants have rates in the lowest.”
Texas is best
Nowrasteh studies data from Texas, the only state that tracks immigration status of people charged and convicted of crimes. He calls Texas an ideal state for his research because it has the second-largest undocumented immigrant population in the country, it borders Mexico and has a history of strict enforcement.
Undocumented immigrants in Texas are 26% less likely to be convicted of homicide compared to native born residents, and legal immigrants are 60% less likely, the research shows.
“If the goal is to cut crime, you do not want to target a population that has a lower criminal conviction rate than native born Americans,” he said.
But even these hard facts can be no match for such an enduring migrant crime narrative. At various points in history, Irish, Italian and Japanese immigrants have been considered threats to public safety.
And one way politicians like Trump stoke fear is to cherry pick examples of gruesome crimes committed by immigrants.
“Of course there have been individual incidents which are truly horrific,” said Reichlin-Melnick. “You have seen several women who have been murdered by individuals who are undocumented. These have been truly awful circumstances and my heart goes out to the family.
Yet, he says, one thing that’s always missing from these accounts is context. These are isolated examples from a population of more than 12 million people.
“It is not correct to point to one or two instances and use that to extrapolate that to an entire population of people of diverse backgrounds, religions, faiths, creeds, national origins who really only share one thing and that is lack of paperwork,” Reichlin-Melnick said.
