Comment by newfriend
7 days ago
Simply incorrect.
That study is yet another that fails to account for the fact that immigration status is not known immediately upon arrest.
> Studies purporting to show low illegal immigrant crime rates in Texas fail to account for the fact that illegal immigrants are not always identified immediately upon arrest. In many cases, illegal immigrants are identified only after they are imprisoned. Given sufficient time for data collection, it appears that illegal immigrants have above average conviction rates for homicide and sexual assault, while they have lower rates for robbery and drugs. [1]
There is also the question of how many illegal aliens actually exist in the US, which severely complicates calculation of rates for their population.
[1] https://cis.org/Report/Misuse-Texas-Data-Understates-Illegal...
“Simply incorrect” overstates what your CIS link shows.
Yes, status isn’t always known at arrest, and time-lag/unknown-status classification is a real measurement issue. But that’s not a demonstration that the cited studies are false; it's a methodological dispute about how Texas data should be interpreted.
Even CIS effectively concedes the key limitation: “any crime” conviction rates aren’t meaningful under their own description because identification is biased toward longer prison terms/serious offenses. That means their approach can’t legitimately be used as a general claim that “undocumented commit more crime.”
Also, Texas is one of the few places where researchers do try to reconcile arrest/ID systems (e.g., Light et al., PNAS 2020): https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2014704117
And there are direct responses to CIS’s Texas framing (e.g., Cato 2024): https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/illegal-immigrant-murde...
So: criticize uncertainty, sure, but “therefore the low-crime finding is simply incorrect” doesn’t follow.
The Cato author rebutted that article, and he and CIS traded rebuttals until this post, where the Cato author backs his point up with copious FOIA data. There seems to have been no further follow-up, so this could be the last word on that particular exchange:
https://www.cato.org/blog/center-immigration-studies-still-w...