Analysis of the CATO institute study on illegal immigrant crime rates (highly misleading results)
The study on illegal immigrant crime rates per capita by the CATO institute is fairly misleading, as it only uses a portion of the data provided to come to it's conclusions. The study compares incomplete illegal immigrant data to complete native citizen data, which is what produces the discrepancy in crime rates in the figures, and does not prove that native citizens commit more crimes than illegal immigrants. The CATO only focused on 46 homicides by illegal immigrants, instead of the total 162 according to the Texas Department of Public Safety (which the study claims to be based on), assuming 3.5 times less murders than presented by the evidence, which is clearly what gave rise to the discrepancy in figures and the idea that illegal immigrants commit less crimes. By using incomplete data, they compare a portion of illegal immigrant murders to all native citizen murders, thus making it appear as if illegal immigrants commit less crimes, when in reality they commit more. This blatant misrepresentation of statistical figures is either a deliberate attempt to skew favor in the direction of illegal immigration, or a severe oversight on the part of the CATO institute, an organization with hundreds of researchers and millions of dollars. According to Texas Department of Public Safety and their Illegal alien crime data, the data the CATO institute claims to be based on, there were 1,929 homicide charges and 1,136 homicide convictions of illegal immigrants, between 2011 and 2018, or over a period of seven years, giving an average of 275 charges and 162 convictions of illegal immigrants for murder per year, during this time period. This is obviously far higher than the 46 homicides for illegal immigrants listed in 2015 by the CATO institute, or approximately 3.5 times more than reported by the study. Given the discrepancies in the way the figures are recorded, the immigration status is not often known at the time of arrest by the DHS, which obviously does not have information on all illegal immigrants, who by being here illegally are generally outside of the U.S. system and thus only if arrested previously would this information be known. The institute claims there is a homicide rate of 3.1 per 100,000 citizen for native citizens, while there is 2.6 for illegal immigrants, when based on the idea that illegal immigrants only committed 46 homicides per year. However, when the total figures of all illegal immigrant homicides are recorded and not just by those known to be illegal immigrants prior to their arrests, or a figure of 162 convictions, this results in a real homicide conviction rate of approximately 9.1 per 100,000 citizens for illegal immigrants, in comparison to 3.1 per 100,000 for native citizens, or figures that are about three times higher. It is clear that by using incomplete data they make illegal immigrant homicides look lower than they really are, which is a blatant misrepresentation of the data.
To further expand, the Texas Department of Public Safety presents three figures in it's fact sheet; crimes by illegal immigrants known to be illegal immigrants prior to their arrest, crimes by illegal immigrants determined by illegal immigrants after the fact, and the total amount of crimes committed by all illegal immigrants. In the first set of figures, that is those known to be illegal immigrants before their arrest, only 538 homicide arrests by illegal immigrants are recorded, far less than the 1,929 homicide arrests in the third set of figures which is from all illegal immigrants. This is due to the fact that in the first set of data, only arrests made of illegal immigrants who had prior been fingerprinted and processed by the DHS were included, which obviously only makes up a small percentage of illegal immigrants. "These figures only count individuals who previously had an encounter with DHS that resulted in their fingerprints being entered into the DHS IDENT database. Foreign nationals who enter the country illegally and avoid detection by DHS, but are later arrested by local or state law enforcement for a state offense will not have a DHS response in regard to their lawful status and do not appear in these counts. However, in addition to the PEP program, DHS actively adjudicates the immigration status of individuals incarcerated in the Texas prison system. At this time, more than 26,000 incarcerated individuals have been identified as being in the country illegally, 10,317 of which were not identified through the PEP program at the time of their arrest." As only a small percentage of illegal immigrants were previously known about at the time of their arrest, the figure between who is known to be an illegal immigrant at the time of arrest and who is discovered to be after the fact is naturally going to be much higher. Therefore when going by the third and complete figure which includes all homicides, the figure is far higher than originally presented, thus giving us a real figure that is over 3 times higher than what the CATO institute reports.
For another obvious flaw in the study, it presents itself as a representation for the entire United State's, however it only uses a single year, in a single state, Texas, for the basis of all it's data, which is clearly a small sample in comparison to the overall figures. Another obvious flaw is that it only references a total of 785 homicides, and a mere 46 homicides for illegal immigrants in the year of 2015. This is a continuing trend with the primary problem with the institutes numbers, which is that their figures are incomplete; for example, there were actually 1,317 homicides in 2015 in Texas and not 785, giving a difference of 532 homicides with the CATO institutes figures, or nearly 40% of homicides not recorded. Part of this is due to a difference in federal and state sentencing, with illegal immigrant crime often being handled at the federal level (and other crimes such as drug trafficking), while part of this is due to unsolved crimes lacking a conviction (in part due to the difficulty of tracking murderers and illegal immigrants). It is also the case that exact figures for illegal immigrants are not actually known, giving rise to further discrepancy. While not a fundamental problem to the illegal immigrant data, it's clear that the CATO institute is simply using a small portion of total murders to make it's conclusions, further implicating their data and skewing the math of their figures in their favor.
An analysis for other crimes, other than homicide, is more difficult given the CATO institutes grouping of crimes together differing from the Texas Department of Public Safety. However, for a rough comparison,
