Fact Checking Donald Trump

According to Linda Chavez:

In his original remarks, Trump made no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants, though he and the media have treated the insults as if they referred only to illegal immigrants from Mexico.

The point is an important one — in fact, Trump and many who think as he does conflate the population. They are not just anti-illegal immigration; they are opposed to immigration overall, especially from Latin America.

This is certainly true of groups like the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and NumbersUSA, whose goals are to reduce legal immigration of both low-skilled and high-skilled immigrants. 

Their ultimate objective is to reduce population overall, as they make clear in their many position papers on the negative impact of population on the environment.

Oddly, conservatives have made common cause with these groups, whose roots are in the population-control and environmental movements, hardly in tune with conservative values.

But what about Trump’s contention that Mexico is sending us criminals and rapists? In fact, the very opposite is true. Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, like all immigrants, have lower rates of criminal behavior than the native born.

At the very time that immigration, including illegal immigration, was going up, crime was going down.

As a new study from Walter Ewing, Daniel Martinez and Ruben Rumbaut points out, the foreign-born population rose from 7.9 percent to 13.1 percent from 1990 to 2013, and the number of unauthorized immigrants more than tripled, but the violent crime rate declined by 48 percent and property crime by 41 percent.

This phenomenon has been studied thoroughly in so-called gateway cities, such as Miami, El Paso, San Antonio and San Diego, which attract large numbers of newcomers.
Of the top 10 safest big cities ranked by Congressional Quarterly using FBI statistics, fully seven have very large Hispanic immigrant populations.

El Paso, with its 81 percent Hispanic population, including 26 percent who are foreign-born, has ranked as the safest large city in the US for several years...

As for incarceration rates, immigrant men ages 18 to 39 are less than half as likely to be incarcerated than native-born men the same age, according to the Ewing study.

Mexican men are even less likely to be incarcerated: Their rates are one-third that of natives with similar demographic characteristics.

And Salvadoran and Guatemalan men are incarcerated at one-fifth the rate of native-born men without a high school degree — the group most likely to commit violent crimes.