Trump’s RNC Speech on Migrant Crime

And John Oliver cites me

Donald Trump’s first mention of illegal immigration in last week’s speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president was how he turned to look at a chart of border chaos at the exact right moment to avoid a bullet fired by would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks that grazed his ear instead of killing him. Other than him recounting surviving a serious attempt on his life – the most serious attempt on a sitting president or candidate since John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan in 1981 – his acceptance speech was pure Trump. It was part rambling, funny, boring, and he spent the most time complaining about illegal immigration and crime.

When Trump first launched his campaign for the Republican nomination on June 16, 2015, he focused on illegal immigration with the now infamous line, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Years later, immigration expert and reporter Dara Lind wrote, “‘Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you’ is the only speech Trump knows how to give.” Last night, when he accepted the Republican Party's nomination to run for president for the third time, Trump proved that Lind was right again by delivering the same speech. Regardless of Trump's statements and the political effectiveness of his arguments, the facts show that "immigrants are not coming over the border to kill you."

Trump’s speech last night focused on some heinous crimes committed by illegal immigrants, like the murders of Joselyn Nungaray in Houston, Rachel Morin in Maryland, and Laken Riley in Georgia. The criminals who took the lives of those young women should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, just like all criminals should be punished. These examples of immigrant criminality are tragic, but they are not a good argument for the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country,” as Trump argued last night. Such a brutal domestic campaign would not lower crime rates and would likely raise them.

Why? Illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. The best data on this comes from the conservative border state of Texas, which is the only state to keep decent statistics on criminality by immigration status. Illegal immigrants were 37 percent less likely to be convicted of homicide in Texas than native-born Americans in 2022, the last year for which reliable data are available. Legal immigrants are 63 percent less likely to be convicted of homicide. Those patterns are similar for all crimes in the state, but those are less reliable. Immigrants are coming to the U.S., and some of them are criminals, but they are bringing less crime than if they acted like native-born Americans.

One counterargument is that illegal immigrants commit many crimes, but they aren't convicted because they flee back across the border. This is unlikely because police clearance rates, the percentage of crimes solved by police resulting in an arrest, are no lower in states with many illegal immigrants for homicide and other violent or property crimes. If illegal immigrants were committing many more crimes than they were being convicted of, police clearance rates would be lower in states with many illegal immigrants – but they’re not.

A mass deportation campaign to remove illegal immigrants to reduce crime would backfire in two ways that would likely raise crime rates. The first is by redirecting state, local, and federal law enforcement to identifying and removing illegal immigrants rather than solving or deterring real crimes. There’s no lower crime in locations with intensive local enforcement of immigration laws, but most of those areas have small populations of illegal immigrants, so the negative effects on other criminal law enforcement wouldn't necessarily show up.

The second way is that by simply removing illegal immigrants who, as a population, are less crime-prone than native-born Americans, the nationwide crime rate would be higher than it otherwise would be. This doesn't necessarily mean that any individual left in the United States after such a massive deportation campaign would be in more danger, but it wouldn't Make America Safe Again.

As a matter of principle, collective punishments on entire groups of people for the crimes of a few are contrary to Western and American values. Individuals are responsible for their own actions, and others bear no responsibility. As far as we can tell, Thomas Matthew Crooks acted alone and is solely responsible for his attempted assassination of Trump last week. If investigators discover that he acted with others to plot his crime, then those individuals would be responsible, but it would be wrong to blame all young white men just because of Crooks' actions.

In 2019, Patrick Wood Crusius murdered 23 people in El Paso, Texas in 2019. He was motivated by the Great Replacement Theory, a weird ideology that believes white people are being replaced by non-white immigrants as part of a conspiracy-driven invasion. It's an odious, untrue, and idiotic conspiracy theory – but Crusius is the one responsible for his crimes and not the non-violent people who write about, believe, or spread that ideological nonsense. It would be doubly wrong to, again, blame all young white American men in Texas who are concerned about border chaos for Crusius' heinous crime.

Similarly, the individual illegal immigrants who commit murder here are to blame. Jose Ibarra is charged with murdering Laken Riley, Johan Martinez, and Franklin Ramos are charged with murdering Joselyn Nungaray, and Victor Martinez-Hernandez is charged with murdering Rachel Morin. They are responsible for their actions and should be punished to the fullest extent of the law if convicted. Other illegal immigrants, whether from the same country or as an entire group, are not to blame for the actions of these depraved criminals. Collective punishment is wrong and won’t work to reduce crime rates anyway.

The above facts are not comfort to the victims of crime – and they shouldn't be. The victims and their families deserve justice and vengeance for the harm they've suffered. However, those harms are not a justification for collective punishments to mass deport millions of people who are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. Punish and deport the criminals; don't punish and deport others.

On Sunday, John Oliver had an entire segment about migrant crime on Last Week Tonight where he cites research I coauthored with Michelangelo Landgrave and Andrew C. Forrester and other work by David J. Bier. Oliver’s migrant crime episode isn’t fully available online yet, but the snippet below will satisfy your curiosity in the meantime.