GETTY

AMERICANGREATNESS.COM

Illegal Aliens Commit Fewer Crimes Than U.S.-Born? Not So Fast

JULIE KELLY

August 27th, 2018

The day before we left to take our oldest child to college for the first time, police found the body of Mollie Tibbetts. The news about the 20-year-old college student who went missing while on an evening jog in July had made me nervous for the past month. It was hard to read coverage of Mollie’s disappearance without getting a pit in my stomach about sending my daughter away to school. We talked about how to stay safe, the buddy system, the influence of alcohol, carrying mace, and every other base I could cover.

As my daughter and I were scrambling to finish last-minute tasks before heading out to Syracuse, news alerts shared the devastating news: The petite, pretty girl from Iowa was dead. Hours later, more infuriating details followed: Mollie was hunted down, murdered, stuffed into a car trunk and dumped in a cornfield by a monster who shouldn’t be this country. (There are no charges against Cristhian Rivera for sexual assault as yet.)

I was outraged, heartsick, and scared. My daughter also was afraid; I again warned her that evil is everywhere. And I fumed that our government fails repeatedly to keep our children safe from people who are in our country illegally.

Anti-Trump Media Mob Springs into Action
Apparently, according to libertarian writer Nick Gillespie, this makes me an xenophobe. It was a matter of moments before pundits and politicians were offering cover for Rivera. The anti-Trump media mob went into overdrive to downplay the story because it interfered with breaking news about Paul Manafort’s conviction and a plea deal for Trump’s personal attorney, Michael Cohen. (The timing of the news about Tibbetts, according to one New York Times reporter, “could not have been better” for Trump and his supporters.)

An Associated Press reporter quickly warned that the details about Mollie’s murder would be “coming to a Trump rally near you.” (The president held an event in West Virginia that evening.) Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) expressed concern about mothers being separated from their children, but she wasn’t talking about Mollie’s mother being separated viciously and permanently from her only daughter; Warren was shamefully regurgitating pro-immigration talking points about families at the border. “Separating a mama from a baby does not make this country safer.” (Irony alert.)

MSNBC contributor and Fordham University professor Christina Greer lamented that coverage about “some girl in Iowa” would obscure news about Manafort and Cohen. NeverTrumper Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, was sitting next to Greer and did not say a word to object to the grotesque political diminution of a heinous crime.

Data Deceptions
Follow-up articles flooded the scene to remind Americans that illegals are less likely to commit crimes than legal residents. News and opinion outlets representing all corners of the ideological spectrum—from the Washington Post to National Review—uniformly cited a single study by the Cato Institute as proof that “data” show illegal aliens actually pose less of a danger than do native-born Americans.

“Most social scientists who have looked at crime among immigrants have concluded that noncitizens are less likely to engage in criminal activity,” wrote Jeremy Peters in the New York Times on Friday. “A recent study by the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, for example, found that in Texas, conviction and arrest rates for undocumented immigrants were lower than those for native-born Americans.” But despite these grand claims, the Cato paper is the only one Peters cites.