When Facts Don’t Cooperate

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.