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.
Its a fair point, and well explained. However, I think it implies that illegal immigrants are fine so long as they’re not more criminal than the general population.
Generally if somebody is using crime statistics to argue for more immigration control, they’re probably the kind of person that believes the only acceptable amount of crime for an illegal immigrant to commit is zero crime.
Yes but they’re victims of crime too. So even if the absolute number of crimes goes up with immigrants, citizens will each experience less crime.