The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Barbara Ball
I have spent the last two years rolling my eyes over the blatant factual inaccuracies posited by pundits on both sides of the current political chasm. I’ve had enough. Please, people, do some research before you open your mouth. You know who you are.
The apparent source of Mr. Johnson’s “facts” might be the Center for Immigration Studies. This nonprofit is a conservative think tank, widely recognized as having a right-leaning restrictionist viewpoint sometimes accused of circulating works by white nationalist and antisemitic writers. While I hate to cite Wikipedia — look it up. Link to CIS post by Todd Bensman in July of 2024 is attached.
On the other side is the nonprofit American Immigration Council, a subsidiary of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. This group advocates for immigrant rights but almost certainly condones legal immigration and a more inclusive immigration system. Their publication “Debunking the Myth of Immigrants and Crime” is also freely available online.
If neither of those groups appeals to your personal viewpoint, I invite you to consult our own Customs and Border Protection published statistics, also online. This site offers actual statistics from Fiscal Year 2017-25. Given here are the absolute numbers of crimes, by type, for which “criminal aliens” have been convicted. If the diligent reader does not care to do the math, I have done it for you. Mr. Johnson is concerned with rape, murder, and “abuse.”
Assault/battery/domestic violence — average of 787 per year
Murder — average of 24 per year
Sexual offenses — average of 213 per year
Illegal entry — average of 5,550 per year
One can easily see that the overwhelming criminality of these immigrants is the mere fact of their illegal entry, not any other kind of criminal behavior. The categories of offense most commonly attributed to criminal convictions are related to DUI and drug possession. If we contrast these raw numbers with the estimated millions of illegal entries yearly, the rates are very low — at most about .08 assaults committed per thousand illegal aliens. (Please feel free to check my math.)
By contrast, the absolute count of these same categories of crime for the entire U.S. numbers in the millions each year. According to the government website, the rate of simple assault in the U.S for 2024 was 14.2 per 1,000 persons over age 12 (an important distinction) — about 177 times the rate committed by immigrants. For rape, the rate was 2 per 1,000 persons. The murder rate has fluctuated since 201,7 with an average of about .06 per 1,000 people (of all ages).
I am not suggesting that the approximately 1,024 yearly offenses of the type named by Mr. Johnson, those committed by criminal aliens, are to be dismissed. Those 1,000-plus victims are certainly worthy of our concern. But what if the victims themselves were criminal aliens? Do they still warrant our concern? My actual point is that the rate at which the criminal alien so loathed by those on the right commits these kinds of crimes is minuscule when compared to the rate at which the average US citizen commits those same crimes. The FBI gives us a bit more insight.
For the last 10 years, over 42% of murderers were not Hispanic or Latino, so not from a Mexican cartel. Almost 48% of homicides were committed in the home, 37% by handguns. Over 45% of murders were committed by Black or African Americans, over 53% of victims were of that ethnicity. Murders are overwhelmingly committed by men on men, 32% of those offenders are in their 20s.
These FBI figures suggest what most of us know. Murders are often committed by someone the victim knows, and often at home. The victim is often the same ethnicity as the offender. I would like to know something from the “criminal alien” alarmists — why on earth would any illegal immigrant draw attention to himself by committing a crime at all? The huge majority keep their heads down, work, pay taxes, go to school, raise their families. These alarmists’ panic and outrage would be better targeted at homegrown criminals, as that is where the overwhelming majority of crime actually occurs.
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