This week, Democrat Sen. Chris Murphy argued on the Senate floor that actually, you’re “statistically safer” living in an immigrant neighborhood because immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans.
“Whether you choose to want to believe the facts or not, that is not my decision, it’s your decision,” the senator from Connecticut said. “But immigrants commit crimes in this country at a rate lower than natural-born citizens. You may not believe that … but I hate to tell you, it is the truth.”
His comments came not just amid President Joe Biden’s unprecedented and ongoing border crisis but ahead of Senate Republicans’ second attempt so far this year to pass a bipartisan border security bill to address what Murphy called a “fake ‘immigrant crime wave’” designed to “breed fear and resentment of immigrants.” The bill failed.
What should we make of Murphy’s little speech? The notion that immigrants are somehow more upstanding and law-abiding than people born in the United States is an old argument that Democrats and slack-jawed libertarians trot out every time Republican lawmakers try to fix the border or raise any objections to illegal immigration. But since Murphy — who, let’s be clear, has never lived in an immigrant neighborhood — trotted out the argument this week, let’s address it head-on.
The first problem is conflating legal and illegal immigrants. Setting aside whether we should increase or decrease the number of legal immigrants, or whether legal immigration is a net positive for the country, there’s no question that 100 percent of illegal immigrants commit crimes. Every single one of them commits a crime the moment they illegally cross the international border between the United States and Mexico. Even those who claim asylum only do so as part of formal removal proceedings — removal, because no matter their particular background or reason for coming to America, they have unlawfully entered the U.S., and as soon as they’re arrested by Border Patrol their deportation process begins. Adjudicating asylum claims is part of that process, not an exemption from it.
At least that’s how the law is supposed to work. The Biden administration has found creative ways to ignore or bypass U.S. immigration law, but the fact remains that it’s illegal to enter the country except through a port of entry, and if you sneak in between ports of entry then you’re committing a crime.
Why is this important? Because the studies that Democrats like Murphy and the open-borders crowd at places like the CATO Institute often cite conflate legal and illegal immigrants, which skews the data and gives the misimpression that all immigrants are somehow better and more upstanding people than American citizens. For example, a 2023 Stanford study found that since 1960, immigrants have been less likely to be incarcerated than those born in the U.S. and that immigrants haven’t committed more crimes than the native-born population since 1870.
Interestingly, the Stanford study found that since 2005, Mexican and Central American immigrants actually do have higher incarceration rates than native-born Americans. This is because the U.S. Census data the researchers relied on didn’t distinguish between “criminal acts” and “immigration-related offenses,” as the researchers put it, as if there’s a difference between the two. (For what it’s worth, the relevant data suggest illegal immigrants do commit crimes at a much higher rate than both legal immigrants and the native-born.)
But set all that aside for a minute. Let’s posit for the sake of argument that Murphy is right, that immigrants — legal and illegal — commit fewer crimes than the native-born U.S. population. Is that a good reason to do nothing in the face of mass illegal immigration? Some 10 million foreign nationals have illegally entered the country since Joe Biden took office. We’ve imported a whole new population from every corner of the world, one that will change America for generations to come no matter what policies we put in place now or in the future. Many of these foreign nationals, whatever their criminal history or lack thereof, are here to stay.
Here’s why that’s a problem: No one asked American voters if they wanted this new population. Americans had no say whatsoever about a seismic shift in our country’s makeup that didn’t have to happen. Why did it happen? Several reasons, most salient among them is a desire on the part of Democrats to reconstitute what they hope will be a majority coalition that will keep them in power. They’re losing the support of historic Democratic voting blocs, namely blacks and Hispanics and the white working class, and their hope is that these voters can be replaced by newly arrived immigrants.
On an even more basic level, mass illegal immigration is a serious problem because it compromises our integrity and coherence as a nation. America isn’t just an idea — despite what liberals and many self-styled conservatives might think. America is primarily a people with a recognizable culture, language, customs, folkways, and traditions. Most Americans would like to preserve these things and pass them on to our children. Importing millions of foreigners from all over the world will destroy all that. It will change the character of the nation in a sudden, jarring, and artificial way. Objecting to that prospect isn’t racist or bigoted, it’s natural and patriotic. As Americans, we have a right to demand an end to illegal immigration — and also to demand that legal immigration serve the interests of the American people, not the millions of foreigners who want to come here.
Understood in that light, why should we care whether immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than the native-born? Even if every illegal immigrant who sneaks over the border is a doctor or a scientist or a hard-working entrepreneur who just wants to come to America for a better life, at this point I don’t care. If we’re going to be a country and a people, not just consumers or cogs for global capital, then we can’t allow millions of people from other countries and cultures to pour over our border and into every corner of America.
So the next time schoolmarmish politicians like Murphy scold us about being inferior to immigrants because we’re more likely to commit crimes, the proper response should be: I don’t care. I’m an American. This is my country. Close the border.
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