Quote:
Originally Posted by boxcar
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Debunked
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...ers-daca-gangs
Over that time, Lott found, immigrants who were “deportable” made up a disproportionate share of the people who were convicted of crimes and incarcerated, relative to their share of the Arizona population as a whole — suggesting that they might, in fact, commit crimes at higher rates than American citizens. And young deportable immigrants were the most overrepresented in Arizona’s prisons: Deportable immigrants “between 15 and 35 make up 2.27% of the total population and 7.94% of convicts,” Lott wrote.
Lott’s core thesis — that unauthorized immigrants are in fact more likely to commit crimes than other groups — is itself a little shaky. There are some questions about the reliability of the Arizona data Lott used. (A small but nonzero number of prisoners show up in the data as US-born but not US citizens, for example, which is all but impossible.)
There are much bigger questions about whether Lott is interpreting that data accurately. He says his data shows high incarceration among “illegal immigrants,” but the actual term in the records is “deportable” — a category that includes both unauthorized immigrants and legal immigrants who’ve lost their legal status, often because they’ve been convicted of certain crimes.
