It’s no surprise immigration is a hot political issue this year, as the number of foreign-born people in the United States reaches its highest level since 1890. What’s less clear is why candidates are campaigning on the issue of migrant crime.
Everytime there is “migrant crime,” conservatives report it, hypnotizing their viewer base with buzzwords and micro-traumatic imagery, farming engagement through outrage with the ultimate goal of channeling anger into votes.
Far-right politicians and their allies are making two dishonest claims about the connection between immigration and crime.
First, they’re claiming there is currently a wave of violent crime in the United States.
This is false. In 2023, violent crime fell near its lowest rate in 50 years.
Second, they are claiming that undocumented immigrants are the cause of this violent crime wave. This too is false and easily debunked by the data.
Research by the American Immigration Council looked at FBI data over a 23-year period and found that immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans. Not only are immigrants less likely to commit violent crimes, but higher rates of immigration are associated with decreases in both violent and property crime in communities.
Put differently, where there are more immigrants, there is less crime.
The data is clear: immigrants follow the law with more fealty than those who are born here. Not only are they more law-abiding, but immigrants actively reduce crime rates.
In the rare instances where immigrants commit crimes, they should be held accountable for their actions, just like everybody else. But the facts show that they are not driving up crime rates in the country.
Donald Trump and Republicans have highlighted isolated cases such as the “gang takeover” in Aurora, Colo. as a result of Venezuelan migrants.
In August, a video surfaced showing alleged gang violence at an apartment complex in Aurora. The video shows a gang entering an apartment building with several weapons and then making their way through a door to rob the tenants by gunpoint.
The recently arrested main perpetrator, nicknamed “Cookie,” is a member of the Venezuelan gang “Tren De Aragua.” His gang affiliations are the focal point of this conflict, and it has led people to believe that the Tren De Aragua gang had taken over Aurora.
Because of this isolated incident, Trump has been repeating this vague, unfounded claim: Venezuela is emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending those people as migrants to the United States.
During a Trump rally in Walker, Mich. Trump claimed, “In Venezuela, their crime is down 72% because they’ve taken their criminals, their gang members, their drug dealers, and they brought them into the United States of America.”
There is no evidence that the Venezuelan government is releasing prisoners and expelling them from the country. To truly understand why there is such an influx of Venezuelan immigrants, we need to understand what went wrong in Venezuela.
Upon the death of President Hugo Chávez on March 5, 2013, Vice President Nicolás Maduro assumed the powers and responsibilities of the president. On July 29, 2024, Maduro illegally claimed the presidency of Venezuela once again, despite global condemnation of a rigged election.
Maduro has cracked down on journalists and protesters and even issued arrest warrants on his political opponents. He has turned Venezuela from a rich democracy to a violent dictatorship on the brink of collapse.
More than 7.7 million people have fled Venezuela as a result of hyper-inflation, corruption, and the collapse of the oil industry, an industry that once accounted for 75% of the nation’s exports and was dramatically stifled by U.S imposed sanctions.
What followed the sanctions was nearly a decade of hunger, poverty and decay that continues to this day. Over a quarter of Venezuela’s population is actively experiencing a food insecurity crisis.
With poverty comes crime, and it was these dire economic circumstances that transformed Venezuela from a relatively safe country to having the highest murder rate on earth in 2018.
Prisons became so overcrowded that the government could no longer manage them. In a last ditch effort to restore order, Maduro enacted a policy called “hybrid government” where he actually handed over control of the prisons to the gangs. Overall, it was a terrible idea.
This is one of many examples of how Republicans have been able to blow a situation out of proportion and choose to ignore the truth when they spread their rhetoric. They use these isolated examples of migrant violence to paint a picture of a country in chaos due to what they regularly call an immigrant “invasion.”
During the Vice-Presidential debate, JD Vance perpetuated the migrant crime theory and questioned the safety of our southern border.
“So we’ve got 20, 25 million illegal aliens who are here in the country. About a million of those people have committed some form of crime in addition to crossing the border illegally.”
Vance was also asked if the Trump administration would separate immigrant families. He dodged the question and said, “We have 320,000 children that the Department of Homeland Security has effectively lost. The real family separation policy in this country is, unfortunately, Kamala Harris’s wide open southern border.”
It’s ironic that Trump and Vance attack Democrats on the border, considering Trump did everything in his power to kill a bill that would have improved the situation at the border.
On May 23, Senate Democrats failed to advance The Border Act of 2024, with nearly every Republican voting to filibuster it. The bill would’ve shut down the border, strengthened the asylum laws, and ended catch and release.
Vance voted against the bill after Trump called Republicans and told them not to vote for it. Trump and Republicans would rather run on a problem as dire as the border than actually fix it.
The border situation–unlike the migrant crime situation–-isn’t a non-issue or just a news item being brought up to stoke division before the election. The mismanagement of the border hurts both Americans and migrants.
From an administrative level, there is no infrastructure in place to accommodate this mass influx of asylum requests from migrants. The average wait time for an asylum hearing is four and a half years.
Under U.S law, poverty and hunger are not valid asylum claims. To achieve asylum protections migrants would have to prove they are fleeing violence or persecution from their home country, which in the case of Mexico and most of Central America, would be very hard to prove.
Yet, any migrant claiming asylum has the right to be heard by a judge, leaving millions of people with potentially invalid asylum claims stuck somewhere in the U.S.
Border issues hurt Americans because it helps the cartels import fentanyl, a drug which killed 112,000 people last year. It also hurts migrants with legitimate asylum claims who now find themselves lost in a system that was set up to benefit them.
Trump’s campaign and presidency has been defined by his assault on immigrant families and communities, starting from the moment he launched his campaign in 2015. The Trump Administration has weaponized a long-broken immigration system to enact a series of policies that resulted in an unprecedented xenophobic attack on immigrant families and communities.
Trump had the chance to introduce significant immigration legislation during his first 2 years as president when Republicans held the majority in the House of Representatives and Senate, but instead chose to pass policies that devastated immigrant communities across the country and directly threatened the lives of thousands of individuals.
Mass deportations, separating families, and recklessly using ICE to raid homes and workplaces endangered immigrants and overall could have ruined their lives. These policies don’t fix immigration at its root cause.
Republican “solutions” are a temporary band-aid on a wound that could be fixed with enough time and empathy.
The path to apply for citizenship should be easy for anybody who wants to come to America; there should be no discrimination or eviction to anybody who wants to pursue their happiness here.
The truth is that those who are doing the most complaining would rather fearmonger about immigrants than do their jobs and pass legislation to restore order at the border and fix the immigration system.
Rather than spreading these baseless claims, they should do their jobs and work with serious policymakers on both sides of the aisle to pass legislation that will restore order at the border and modernize our immigration system to work for America.
