Contrary to the “worst of the worst” posturing presented by the Trump administration, it’s long been known that immigrants (both legal or otherwise) commit fewer crimes than natural-born US citizens:
Our consistent finding is that legal immigrants have the lowest incarceration rates, followed by illegal immigrants, and that native-born Americans have the highest. Illegal immigrants are half as likely to be incarcerated as native-born Americans, and legal immigrants are 74 percent less likely to be incarcerated….
A bunch of weird racists like to argue about these findings, claiming that this lower crime rate only presents itself because the natural-born group doesn’t factor out Black people, which these bigots assume commit so many crimes that it makes white people look like menaces to society. Not so, says the bemused Cato Institute, which not only delivers more facts but calls out these bigots for their stupid bigotry.
A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….
[…]
Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.
Watching bigots own themselves is always fun. But it hasn’t stopped the “worst of the worst” rhetoric from the bigots running the administration, which continues to make this claim even though they have to know the facts don’t back them up.
As of June 14, ICE had booked into detention 204,297 individuals (since October 1, 2024, the start of fiscal year 2025). Of those book-ins, 65 percent, or 133,687 individuals, had no criminal convictions. Moreover, more than 93 percent of ICE book-ins were never convicted of any violent offenses. About nine in ten had no convictions for violent or property offenses. Most convictions (53 percent) fell into three main categories: immigration, traffic, or nonviolent vice crimes.
It’s all about removing people this white nationalist government doesn’t like and has nothing to do with making America safer.
But this same administration is also taking some damage from inflation rates it can’t bring down, oil prices its actions continue to keep sky-high, and a runaway deficit it appears entirely unwilling to rein in. Given all of this, you’d think it might want to welcome more migrants to the US, rather than eject as many as possible in the shortest time possible.
Here’s the real news about migrants: they pay more taxes, use fewer government resources, and — if allowed — could be the best way to dig us out of the GOP-exacerbated deficit hole. Once again, it’s the Cato Institute delivering the facts the administration would prefer to ignore:
- Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
- Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.
- Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.
Given all of this, it should come as no surprise that flooding cities with ICE officers and engaging in a concerted war on migrants tends to hurt the people the GOP most often pretends to care about: US citizens and small business owners.
A new study shows that the widespread fear and isolation caused by the immigration crackdowns that began in early 2025 had a significant economic toll on Chicago commerce, draining over $1.26 billion from local businesses.
The report, published by the University of Illinois Chicago, used anonymous cellphone GPS data to track movement between immigrant and non-immigrant neighborhoods throughout Chicago’s Cook County. Researchers found that the routine back-and-forth between these areas collapsed almost immediately after President Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, amid rampant rumors and the subsequent sweeps that Chicago would be targeted for immediate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids.
According to the report, local businesses have seen a 9% drop in sales, with restaurants being hit the hardest, with a nearly 10% reduction in sales. Most small businesses are incapable of surviving single-digit sales declines (especially in retail where margins are tightest). Restaurants have always been a gamble, but when the government interferes (even indirectly) with your clientele, the risk increases and chance of survival drops precipitously.
Meanwhile, the front-mouths of the administration continue to pretend terrorizing entire communities somehow provides more jobs for Americans. But it’s a rising tide that lifts all boats. A tsunami of enforcement might lift boats, but only before it smashes them against the nearest hard surface, to follow this metaphor to its Trumpian conclusion.
Then there’s the human cost that can’t be captured in year-over-year sales figures:
“I have to go grocery shopping, but I haven’t. What if ICE is there?” a Chicago waitress named Caridad told NPR at the time, requesting that her last name be withheld, for fear of being targeted. “People are more than afraid, they’re panicking.”
People are going without the necessities of life because the trade-off for patronizing a local business might be their actual lives and freedoms. The retailer loses business. The residents lose whatever’s left of their autonomy. And those who still want to maintain some resemblance of a normal live are either risking their freedom by leaving the house or paying a premium to have someone else (read: delivery services) do the things they used to do themselves. And in this economy, choosing the second option simply isn’t sustainable.
If you add it all up, the best way for cities, states, and the federal government to bounce back before we hit another Great Depression would be to immediately cease these anti-migrant efforts and do more to ensure migrants who are already here — and contributing more than their fair share to the economy and public safety — are provided a clear, safe, and expedited path to naturalization. To do otherwise is to be part of the problem, rather than a solution for whatever appears to lacking from America’s “greatness.”