Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Mexican immigrants – legal and illegal – are less educated and have lower incomes than the rest of the population, so it makes sense that they would have a higher crime rate than average.  It turns out, in California at least, that they don’t.  And the difference between Mexican immigrants and the average isn’t just trivial, it’s rather significant.  It’s easy to explain why this is true for illegal immigrants — they have a huge incentive to avoid any contact with law enforcement and so the benefit gained from the commission of crime is easily outweighed by the possibility of deportation.

And, of course, software engineers in the US on H-1B visas don’t commit crimes at any high rates, and Mexicans don’t either.  From a study by the Public Policy Institute of California:

Noncitizen men from Mexico between the ages of 18 and 40, which the study indicated were more likely to be in the country illegally, were eight times less likely to be in a “correctional setting,” the study found.

So often, crime is associated with illegal immigrants, and especially Latino and Chicano men who live in urban areas.  And since so much of our fear of immigrants (despite little evidence that they drive down wages or increase crime) is driven by a classic fear of the unknown, the different and the foreign, it’s not surprising that people just assumed that immigrants would increase crime.

This is why I think that people who favor greater immigration, like immigrants, and think that restrictionism is stupid shouldn’t necessarily get bogged down in exactly what the effect on wages is or how much crime goes up or down.  Instead, we should recognize that a la Jonathan Haidt that our emotional connection to immigrants is borne out of our valuing of fairness and harm in our moral calculations as opposed to honor or purity.  And sure, evidence that immigration has little negative effects on the US economy are fine, but that’s not why we support immigration.  We support immigration and refuse to stigmatize illegal immigrants because the gains to the immigrants themselves are extremely high.  Basically because they’re people too.  And until the other side realizes this, most immigration debates are pretty silly.  You can’t fight atavistic prejudice with facts.