A lot of my libertarian friends, especially at the currently drifting but once-great Cato Institute, like to defend their clueless open-borders disposition by pointing to statistics that purport to demonstrate that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. Even if you assume the crime statistics are complete and accurate these days (and usually it is libertarians who express doubt that our law enforcement bureaucracy reports accurately), it misses two points obvious to a first-grader, but not apparently to the pre-school mentality of some libertarians: if we actually controlled our borders, the crime rate from illegal immigrants would be near-zero, whatever the actual prevalence. (Just ask Laken Riley, who would be alive right now if we did have serious border control.) But second, the true illegal immigrant crime rate is 100%; it’s indicated in the title itself. Duh.
Better would be some kind of discrimination about rates of crime among various immigrant groups. Here it is interesting to see what Norway’s crime statistics, pried loose by one of Norway’s right-leaning political parties against predictable opposition from the self-hating left, can tell us. The chart below is in Norwegian, but it denotes the prosecution rate per 1,000 individuals for violent crime in Oslo among men age 15-24, 2021-23.
Headline: Almost half of young Somali men in Oslo (483 out of 1000) were arrested and charged with violent crime over the two-year period in question.
Chaser—it’s not just Norway:
Much more at this Twitter/X thread.
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