Trump’s Mass Deportation Plans Won’t Make America Safe Again
In fact, they will increase crime rates in the country
Donald Trump’s first mention of illegal immigration in his speech accepting the Republican Party’s nomination for president was how he turned to look at a chart of border chaos at the exact right moment to avoid a bullet fired by would-be assassin Thomas Matthew Crooks that grazed his ear instead of killing him. Other than his account of surviving an attempt on his life—the most serious one against a sitting president or candidate since John Hinckley Jr. shot President Reagan in 1981—his acceptance speech was pure Trump: Part rambling, funny, boring, and focused on his favorite subject: complaining about illegal immigration and crime.
When Trump launched his campaign for the Republican nomination for his run in 2015, he infamously noted about Mexican immigrants, “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Years later, immigration expert and reporter Dara Lind wrote, “‘Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you’ is the only speech Trump knows how to give.” Trump proved Lind right by yet again by delivering the same speech. Regardless of Trump's statements and the political effectiveness of his arguments, the facts show that "immigrants are not coming over the border to kill you.”
Trump’s speech focused on some heinous crimes committed by illegal immigrants, like the murders of Jocelyn Nungaray in Houston, Rachel Morin in Maryland, and Laken Riley in Georgia. These criminals should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, just like all criminals should be. But they offer no justification for Trump’s plan to launch the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country” if reelected.
Such a brutal domestic campaign would likely raise—not lower—crime rates. Why?
For starters, undocumented immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. The best data on this comes from the conservative border state of Texas, which is the only state that keeps decent statistics on criminality by immigration status. Undocumented immigrants were 37% less likely to be convicted of homicide in Texas than native-born Americans in 2022, the last year for which reliable data are available. Legal immigrants are 63% less likely to be convicted of homicide. Those patterns are similar for all crimes in the state, but those are less reliable. Immigrants are coming to the U.S., and some of them are criminals, but they are bringing less crime than if they behaved like native-born Americans.
One counterargument is that illegal immigrants commit many crimes, but they aren't convicted because they flee back across the border. This is unlikely because police clearance rates, the percentage of crimes solved by police resulting in an arrest, are no lower in states with many undocumented immigrants for homicide and other violent or property crimes. If illegal immigrants were committing many more crimes than they were being convicted of, police clearance rates would be lower in states with many illegal immigrants—but they’re not.
But there are two other ways that a mass deportation campaign would backfire and likely raise crime rates.
One: It would redirect state, local, and federal law enforcement toward identifying and removing illegal immigrants rather than solving or deterring real crimes. Locations that aggressively enforce federal immigration laws don’t experience a lower crime (but most of those areas have small populations of illegal immigrants, so the negative effects on other criminal law enforcement wouldn't necessarily show up because massive resources don’t have to be diverted away from prosecuting other crimes).
Two: Simply by removing undocumented immigrants who, as a population, are less crime-prone than native-born Americans, the nationwide crime rate would be higher than it otherwise would be. The deportation campaign wouldn’t necessarily expose any individual residing in the U.S. to a greater risk of being a victim of a crime, but, the point is, it wouldn't Make America Safe Again.
As a matter of principle, collective punishments against entire groups of people for the crimes of a few are contrary to Western and American values. Individuals are responsible for their own actions, and others bear no responsibility. As far as we can tell, Thomas Matthew Crooks acted alone and is solely responsible for his attempted assassination of Trump last week. If investigators discover that he acted with others to plot his crime, then those individuals would be responsible too. But it would be wrong to blame all young, white men just because of Crooks' actions.
In 2019, Patrick Wood Crusius murdered 23 people in El Paso, Texas. He was motivated by the Great Replacement Theory, a weird ideology that believes white people are being replaced by nonwhite immigrants as part of a conspiracy-driven invasion. It's an odious, untrue, and idiotic conspiracy theory—but you can’t blame all young, white American men in Texas who are concerned about border chaos for Crusius' heinous crime.
Similarly, the individual illegal immigrants who commit murder are to blame. Jose Ibarra is charged with murdering Laken Riley, Johan Martinez and Franklin Ramos are charged with murdering Jocelyn Nungaray, and Victor Martinez-Hernandez is charged with murdering Rachel Morin. If convicted, they should be punished. Other undocumented immigrants, whether from the same country or as an entire group, are not to blame for the depraved actions these criminals are accused of. Collective punishment is wrong and won’t work to reduce crime rates anyway.
The above facts are no comfort to the victims of crime—and they shouldn't be. The victims and their families deserve justice for the harm they've suffered. However, those harms are not a justification for collective punishments to mass-deport millions of people who are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. Punish and deport the criminals; don't punish and deport others.
On Sunday, John Oliver had an entire segment about migrant crime on Last Week Tonight where he cites research I coauthored with Michelangelo Landgrave and Andrew C. Forrester and other work by David J. Bier. It’s worth watching Oliver’s segment in full:
An earlier version of this essay was first published in Alex Nowrasteh’s Deep Dives, the author’s newsletter.
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Please continue writing these pieces. I thoroughly enjoy them!
> Such a brutal domestic campaign would likely raise—not lower—crime rates. Why? For starters, undocumented immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans. The best data on this comes from the conservative border state of Texas, which is the only state that keeps decent statistics on criminality by immigration status.
That’s not how numbers work? In a smaller group, there are less criminals and less crimes, even if the subgroup you removed wasn’t the most criminal, so the numerator will lower. And the denominator of crime rate is registered population, which… er… can’t include undocumented people? What am I missing here?