A guy named Daniel
Greenfield writes a column http://tinyurl.com/q89c5uw claiming that illegal immigration is one of the factors responsible
for gun violence in major U.S. cities and that granting amnesty to illegal
immigration would cause gang and gun violence to increase so significantly in
major cities that their economies will collapse and that a “ripple effect”
would extend to suburbs and entire states.
He describes what will
happen to New York if amnesty is granted:
“Before long, the
marginal gangs will swell to monstrous sizes controlling entire neighborhoods. Anyone who can will flee and the city will once again become what it was.”
He adds, “The same
process will take place in most major American cities.”
His proof is that crime
increased in major cities after the 1986 amnesty. The cause of increases in
crime after 1986, argues Greenfield, is that an influx of illegal aliens after
the amnesty took jobs that poor Americans would have otherwise taken. As a result of lesser available jobs, the
jobless Americans took to crime.
Greenfield’s problem is
that the data don’t support him. First
of all, the economy was booming during the 80s, and the unemployment rate fell
steadily from the mid-80s through 1990 all over the nation and in every
demographic. Second, the number of
murders in Chicago, which had been falling during the 80s decade, continued to
fall after 1986 and only increased in the early 90s during a mild recession. Then after the mild recession, murders in
Chicago continued to decline where in 2013 the number of murders was
considerably less than in 1986 despite the influx of millions of illegal
aliens.
In NBER Working Paper No.12518,
authors George Borjas, Jeffrey Grogger and Gordon
Hanson examine the effect of immigration on crime. The authors point out that even
without increased immigration, most of the unemployment and increase crime
among black men is not related to immigration.
The authors claim that for black men, a 10 percent immigration induced
increase in supply of a particular labor pool skill group appeared to cause a
nearly 1 percentage-point rise in incarceration rates. And this was written by George Borjas, a well
known anti-immigrant fanatic (who is also an immigrant himself, and he hates
irony to boot). So even a well-known anti-immigrant fanatic concludes that
immigration has a miniscule effect on crime.
The actual facts don’t support Greenfield’s claims.
