Last week, I read a few articles based on a 2/27 release from the Immigration Policy Center, telling us how new immigrants, whether legal or illegal, had lower incarceration rates than those with established U.S. residence, and that long-term residents and citizens have the highest incarceration rates. The authors’ conclusion was that people become more crime-prone as they live in U.S. society, rather than the popular perception that immigrants bring crime and criminal behavior with them.
There are many logical fallacies to this reasoning, but I’ll just start with one. Think of it this way: name a class of people who cannot immigrate into the U.S. Answer: “incarcerated people.” So the incarceration rate is exactly zero for brand-spanking new immigrants, and can only go up. So the whole report is useless.
A better study would have been to compare incarceration histories of people in the various groups, although this stillwould proabably be fairly useless since other countries likely have different success rates of locking up criminals, different sentencing, and even different survival rates of prisoners.
I’m not taking sides on whether the popular perception is true or not; that’s not my point.
Open fire.
