Explanation:
The crime rate statistic shows the number of registered crimes divided by the number of registered residents in a country or area.
“Registered” is important here!
If you add undocumented immigrants to the calculation, the statistic is skewed:
Undocumented immigrants aren’t registered as residents for the statistic, since they are, well, undocumented.
However, any crime committed by any one of them will count towards the crime rate when they’re registered by the police.
So even if they were much less likely to commit crime than the resident population on average, the crime rate statistic would still increase. The denominator of the equation doesn’t increase by definition, because only legal residents are counted towards the statistic. But the real number of people inside the country who may commit crimes increases.
This is important to know as context when people try to “prove” immigrants are more criminal than citizens, using the crime rate statistic.
Using your logic, I could drive to the next town over commit some crimes and have the same effect. Pinning it to undocumented people is a way of trying to frame the discussion in a xenophic way.
No, it’s trying to give people ammo to counter when others frame the statistic in a xenophobic way.
You’re right, the effect is more general, it leads to the Vatican having the highest crime rate in the world by far (<800 residents, millions of visitors).
But you don’t often hear right wing agitators try to claim that tourism is bad.
Correct. It’s pretty well known that this skew per capita statics in small-scale analyses. It’s also why you shouldn’t do per-capita analysis on very local scales
You could probably, for most regions in the world, make the reasonable assumption that, on average, the effect balances out; you might be able to drive somewhere and commit a crime, but so can someone else from somewhere else, and so on. Obviously, places which receive a lot of travel are exceptions to this rule, just like places where would-be criminal travelers reside (I’m looking at you, suburbia).
Of course, I’m just speculating in hopes someone else has some real data to back up my claims…