I didn’t know about this. Oh dear, this is terrible. Especially since, as Business Insider state:
But the facts suggest the president’s rhetoric is wrong.
Recent social science research underscores that the relationship between immigration and crime or terrorism is likely the opposite of what Trump seems to believe.
“[I]mmigrants are less, not more, criminal than nonimmigrants” and “immigration rates are largely unassociated with crime rates,” according to a 2002 analysis of immigration-crime studies. It continues: “It is the least reliable and useful sources of data that are used to support arguments about the link between immigration and crime.”
If there is a crime increase related to immigrants, it’s a marginal one tied to poverty and theft. But on crimes that matter most — violent ones — a 2009 study of finds that “broad reductions in violent crime […] are partially attributable to increases in immigration,” as many other recent studies have similarly concluded.
“[R]oughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males age 18-39 are incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born. This disparity in incarceration rates has existed for decades, as evidenced by data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses,” a 2015 update to an analysis of Census Bureau and crime rate statistics said. “In each of those years, the incarceration rates of the native-born were anywhere from two to five times higher than that of immigrants.”
The discrepancy between Trump’s beliefs and policy actions is even more clear when it comes to foreign-born attackers.
According to a September 2016 study by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, some 3,024 Americans died from 1975 through 2015 due to foreign-born terrorism. That number includes the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2,983 people) and averages nearly 74 Americans per year.
Since 9/11, however, foreign-born terrorists have killed roughly one American per year. Just six Americans have died per year at the hands, guns, and bombs of Islamic terrorists (foreign and domestic).
According to Nowrasteh’s analysis, over the past 41 years (January 1975–December 2015), and including the 9/11 attacks:
- The chance an American would be killed by a foreign-born refugee terrorist is 1 in 3.64 billion per year, based on the last 41 years of data.
- The chance of an American being murdered by an undocumented immigrant terroristis 1 in 10.9 billion per year.
- The chance an American could be killed by a terrorist on a typical tourist visa was 1 in 3.9 million.
And some other telling findings:
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In the US, there hasn’t been a single American killed by a terrorist from one of the seven countries included in the President’s travel ban that has been stayed by courts.
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There have been no terrorists from Syria in the US in this period.
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Meanwhile, there were three terrorists from the UK, one from Japan, and one from South Korea.
The video: