Thanks, Tibor (and Dan), this is great as usual! My experience is that even among immigration professors, very few people are willing to acknowledge the veracity of all these true points.
But I'm a bit disappointed in you not having any sort of conclusion here. Especially for the broader public, my experience is that leaving things at "it's complicated" is never a good idea.
As I've written before (https://www.popularbydesign.org/p/immigration-is-not-a-thing-that-has), there's plenty of evidence strongly suggesting that some types of immigration (young, male, low-educated, arriving under asylum or illegal entry) are involved in crime, so you can't just brush it aside. The question people are usually interested in is not whether an exogenous increase in immigration in general raises crime in a particular area, but whether admitting a certain number of young asylum seekers from a particular region will make their country safer or not. That's a different thing altogether. So I do want to push you a bit on having the courage to say what you think we should actually do about any of this :)
Thanks, Alexander! It’s true that I don’t have a strong (or even any sort of) conclusion. I guess I’m just a weird guy who is almost wholly oblivious to actual policy and “what we should do.” Instead, virtually everything I write about and research starts out with me really not having a clue what the facts on the ground are. Not knowing frustrates me a ton. So, I’m moved to review the evidence, try to reconcile apparent contradictions, and just provide (mostly for myself!) an overarching empirical/descriptive picture on the topic. This brings me great satisfaction, and so I usually leave it at that. :D Hopefully, other people learn something new in the process as well.
In principle, of course, what most people are interested is, “Yeah, sure, but what do we do about it?” But such normativity, especially when things are controversial and complicated and messy, is just not my jam. So, sorry to partially disappoint, but I really haven’t a clue what we should do. I really hate politics to my core, as former activists tend to do, I guess.
Sure, I could give you some platitudes, like “we have to do more policing” and “we have to try to be more selective in who we let in.” But even here, there are immediately two normative commitments that jostle inside of me. I’m very libertarian-leaning, just on principle, when it come to national borders (otherwise, I’m a vanilla left-liberal). Not only am I not a nationalist, but borders just seem insane to me from a certain vantage point. So I want to scream “open borders” from one side of my mouth, maybe. At the same time, being a pragmatist, I realize the existing world is strongly shaped by national borders, and I know that most people sperg out about their nationality and borders. So I want to respect that (kinda), especially when things like crime are thrown about.
Then again (as you can clearly see), I’m just really not a normativity/policy kind of guy! I want to crunch the numbers and read studies, and that’s it. Sorry. :P
PS: The Gilbert review seems very good and useful!
I'm going to comment on the area I know something about: Swedish crime stats.
Firstly, the number of foreign borns in Swedish prisons is unknown, because they don't want to do statistics on it. One estimate is that 70-80% of the prison population has "foreign background". (foreign born or with both parents being foreign born)
The number 24% is how many prisoners that have foreign citizenship.
Secondly, the crime rates for some groups is a lot higher than x3. Here is a screenshot from a report by the Crime Prevention Agency. https://postimg.cc/G9CbWPPX It is not translated but I can explain that men, age 15 and above, born in North Africa, 24% were suspected of a crime. In second generation it is 30%.
East Africa and Other Africa have almost identical numbers.
This can't just be explained away by saying that suspicion is not the same as convictions, age, socioeconomy, racism or what not. There are clear and indisputable differences, and the rate for those nations is x10 that of those with native background.
30% suspected of crime is not a tiny minority, it's a significant amount.
As for Jerzy Sarnecki, he has since the 1980s done research with the purpose of proving that immigration cannot possibly increase crime, in such a stubborn way that he has become a meme.
The flaw in adjusting for income, education and socioeconomy is that criminal people tend to be poor and uneducated. They tend to live in poor areas and surround themselves with similar individuals. If we adjust for poverty, we could claim that no one has any overrepresention. We could bring in a million illiterates and have soaring crime rates, and yet claim that "adjusted for education, crime rates have not increased".
That is addressed in the post. The point is most people actually don't care about crime rates among low-educated or poor people, they're focused on ethnicity.
Speaking of which... curious you know so much about this...
The Swedish government didn’t want to produce accurate facts for around 15 years (2004-2021 ca) , so everyone in the “hate” groups had to try and figure it out themselves. I wrote a lot on Quora about it around 2020.
Hein de Haas? Really? I'm Dutch. De Haas, along with his far left comrade Leo Lucassen did their best to smear a data filled book by mathematician and anthropologist Jan van de Beek.
They identified a racist, islamophobe etc. Unfortunately V de Beek could back up every claim with data. Hein de Haas apologized and literally left the debate while his book can be considered more opinion than anything else. Lucassen is worse and a more fanatical ideologue and islamophobe hunter.
The director of the Dutch national statistics bureau (CBS) called him a charlatan. Not surprisingly because there ideology has replaced reality as well. But he also had to apologise after he was proven wrong.
Jan v de Beek:
'In 2022, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) stopped publishing figures on sexual offenses by migration background and made the old figures difficult to find on their website.
The above link provides data on Dutch suspects of rape by nationality/ethnicity. It suggests woke women have their fear of The Patriarchy a tad misaligned geographically...
Anyway, already before V de Beek's book we had plenty experience and data in the Netherlands:
Moroccans are 1/36 of the Dutch population. They produce 50% of crime, and have been overrepresented since the 80s, literally as soon as guest workers began to bring in their families and thus sons. By the age of 21 more than 50% of Moroccan males have had ‘contact’ i.e. is known to the police.
As for the 'it's because young men are overrepresented' argument: that doesn't hold at all. Regular immigrants from N Africa, the Middle East (or West Asia as the Neat Left prefers iit, including the Dutch ministry of education since 2 months), Afghanistan etc can all bring their family. Just like asylum seekers ( 80% are accepted). Somalis bring 6 family members over, Syrians 4 und so wieter und so fort.
The economic argument 'crime is caused by poverty' I buy even less: replace Moroccan, Somali or Caribbean immigrants with Chinese, Indian or Ghanaian immigrants, put them in the exact same economic circumstances, and you'll see crime rates plummet to below average, just like welfare take up.
This is one of the best break downs with plenty of data and charts of European vs American immigration:
The Mirage of America's Special Sauce Theory Philippe Lemoine
On #3, the correlation across the whole OECD is pretty useless. Much of Western Europe has homicide rates around 1/100k, what the plot shows is just what happened to murder rates in the US, not anything informative about Europe.
Re: “what the plot shows is just what happened to murder rates in the US”
No, the US is contributing 1/38 to the graph both in terms of homicides and immigrant stock. Including or excluding the US is immaterial.
OECD with US: 5.95/100k to 3.18, change -2.76
OECD without US: 5.86/100k to 3.07, change -2.79
Re: “not anything informative about Europe”
When I restrict the sample only to European countries, the graph looks virtually identical. Homicide rates were around 8/100k around the year 2000 for Europe in general, and they’re now down to around 2/100k.
Or if you’re interested in the European Union specifically, where most of the immigration debate is happening, homicide was around 4.5/100k in 1995, while it’s around 1.25/100k today. (Foreign-born share increased from 8% to 16% in the meantime.) The correlation is thus exactly what we see on the graph, regardless of how we move around countries (let alone the US, which is not important at all).
The only part of your statement that is vaguely on the right track is where you stated that Western Europe has homicide rates around 1/100k. Even there, it declined from almost 2/100k during the mid-1990s, so homicide basically halved even in Western Europe during the past few decades.
Thank you for the numbers, that is indeed interesting.
But my point is, clearly the original graph doesn't show that? I know immigrants commit less crime than natives in the US, and I have no idea about the numbers in Mexico or Columbia or South Korea. But the point about immigration is that lots of things depend on the country, so to disprove "immigration increased the homicide rate in rich European countries", you need to actually show the data for rich European countries. That Europe indeed had a similar decline has nothing to do with whether your graph shows that or not.
I'm sure you know about Simpson's paradox, so I'd say you should at least group similar countries instead of using all of them, that just seems a bit pointless. From the aggregate I can't tell if this is true for every country, or whether Germany got the immigrants and Poland had the homicide decline.
I commend the intention, but I think many will be unconvinced. Mainly because there is no subdivision of “immigrant”. People with backgrounds rom some countries are overrepresented, whereas others are underrepresented.
In addition, some minor things. The cartoon says violence, the graph says homicide. On the Swedish crime rate: methodologically, correcting for income, education and municipality is not necessarily “correct”, these might correlate with crime, but again, certain national backgrounds pursue education more than others.
Lastly, you write: “They found that Swedish municipalities generally saw violent crime rise from 2000 to 2020, but that rise did not track with the share of residents born abroad”. Here you use the term “residents born abroad”, which I suspect is not the same definition you use other places, and I think you should have begun with defining an immigrant.
Depending on data availability, I tackle everything: immigrants in general, non-EU immigrants, refugees (!), and specifically immigrants from various regions of the world (including Africa or, say, East Asia). Of course, I don’t cover all of those under each of the 5 points. But that’s just due to data availability. We simply don’t have fine-grained immigrant distinctions at the country level. At the region level, data exist for all immigrants and non-EU immigrants. At the individual level (Scandinavia), there’s fine-grained data for immigrants from various parts of the world. In any case, I report all of these, wherever possible.
I did read it. Sure, I could have been less categorical, but as far as I can tell you only briefly mention it in point 2, it does not constitute a substantial part of your analysis. My point is simply that few people oppose immigration completely, most would welcome what they view as contributors, often defined in terms of economics. Not differentiating immigrants to a larger extent thus leaves the fundamental basis for opposition to certain groups of immigrants unanswered.
“Hence, even when some groups do contain higher absolute, individual numbers of criminals (which is of course important to know), the share of criminals within that group is very likely to still be small, overall. That means that any aggregate impact at the population level will also be small.”
No, it does not mean that. The “aggregate impact at the population level“ is not determined by the ratio of criminal immigrants to non-criminal immigrants, but by the ratio of criminal immigrants to total residents (native and immigrant).
If 1,000 Ruritanians enter the country and each of them commits a crime, the Ruritanian crime rate is 100% and 1000 crimes have been committed. If 100,000 Ruritanians enter the country and 1000 of them commit crimes, the Ruritanian crime rate is 1% and 1000 crimes have been committed. Both of these scenarios have the same impact on aggregate crime. The number of decent, honest, hard-working Ruritanian who have entered the country alongside their criminal compatriots has no impact whatsoever on aggregate crime.
One thing I don't understand about this sort of analysis is controlling for socioeconomic variables in crime. It is obvious that when compare two groups with the same wealth, intelligence, gender, age they will have a similar crime rate regardless if they are an immigrant or not. I don't think anyone is arguing that simply being an immigrant automatically make someone more prone to crime.
The issue is immigration policies that are importing people from these crime-prone demographics instead of importing higher quality immigrants. This is evidenced by the fact that certain immigrant groups from africa commit crime at a higher rate than the native population and are overrepresented in prisons.
A lot of people argue that being from a different non western culture is the real issue and that's the cause of crime. It's not obvious at all that demographics would exhaust the explanation for crime.
Key thing to control for is male populations between 15 and 25 (or 30). As immigration adds to that demographic, we should say m separate two effects: demographic shift effect and something about mix of that demographic (immigrant share of that demographic). This all seems doable from demographic data. Since the share of native born young men is falling, foreign born young men are committing a meaningful share of crimes.
You'd need to explain that to me. I am simple. I'm an immigrant. I went from the rich part of the world to a poor one. I integrated. I was poor when I left and I'm still poor now. Fortunately for me there's no welfare here. Finding a job has been hard, still is after 20 years. When I cast my gaze back towards the UK I left all I see is chaos that wasn't there before. It isn't ever going to get better.
So explain the meme. I don't get it. Or not, I don't care really. Life is peaceful, stable and I have the beach 200 metres away. I don't currently have to worry about the same things that they have to in Europe.
I see. My point was that many murders are turned into assaults by the success of western medics. So imo there is, underneath, no plateauing (in the positive sense) of serious violence.
As for immigrants and crime/murder: different immigrant groups have very different crime- and murder rates. Overall a nation's murder rate can decline while looking more granular shows that a specific immigrant segment is above average. Overall Muslim immigrants are less than 10% of the Dutch populace but the practice of honor killing has them overrepresented @ femicide for instance. Progressives are so troubled by this as they want everybody to unconditionally celebrate foreign cultures that they prefer to discuss it as little as possible.
Ok understood. It appeared like you were making contradictory points but I do understand. Mine was the point that while the rate is not going up, it is not going down AND, it was going down and stopped. This seems to not be that popular an opinion and I apparently did some meme whatever is meant by that. I know what a meme is btw, just not the one I am supposed to have done.
I'm not concerned with memes either. But he is a young sociologist:. And apparently, these days, even sociologists allow themselves the title ‘quantative’. (‘data-driven’ in the private sector, we all have our buzzwords): https://sites.google.com/view/tibor-rutar/home
But as you can see from his piece he chooses to not discuss the granular pov. Because there it gets tricky for a progressive. He sticks to the catch all term ‘immigrants’. For my country the Netherlands that means hundreds of thousands of West- and South European, East Asian and American expats and students with below average crime stats. A few hundred thousand Eastern Europeans of whom some nationalities have above average crime stats and others don’t. Around 400.000 immigrants come from the former colony of Surinam. The Hindu segment has extremely low crime stats, the creoles have above average stats. Then there are the immigrants from Dutch Caribbean islands who have very high crime stats. And finally there are immigrants and illegals from N Africa, Somalia, the Middle East and Afghanistan with above average to hysterical crime stats.
From Dutch stats, but also from other European countries, it’s clear males from N Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan lead the sexual crime stats. Absolutely not surprising thinking of home-cultures and their view of western women. Somalis in my country are 22 x often suspected of rape. And asylum may be dominated by young men (why would that be?) but as soon as you have your status you can bring your family. Somalis bring on average 6 family members.
Let’s finish on a positive note: not in print anymore and very expensive second hand, but here as a free pdf, the classic by Polish immigrant Stanislav Andreski (ww2 soldier who fought the Soviets, the Germans, escaped to the UK and did not want to return to communist Poland)
I think those hostile to (mainly) non-white immigration use false ideas about immigrant crime to bolster their case. However, wokeism has made it much harder to simply say, “We don’t want you because you’re black, brown, etc.” The issue with mass non-white immigration is that many native whites don’t want to be replaced (or reduced to a minority) in their own countries. But, apparently, you’re a bad person if you don’t want this.
TBF it is a bit weird to be that concerned with the skin colour of other citizens of your own country over ... you know... things that are actually relevant to standard of living, such as how those citizens behave.
Not weird at all. People generally prefer their own kind. What’s actually weird is an elite determined (or at least unconcerned) to reduce their native population to minorities in their own countries against the wishes of the natives.
I don’t solely blame elites but are they helping? What are the prevailing ideologies they push? Have they been unabashed pro-natalists for decades prior to pushing for mass non-white immigration? No, they are mainly woke; hence, the problem of Muslim immigration.
Thanks, Tibor (and Dan), this is great as usual! My experience is that even among immigration professors, very few people are willing to acknowledge the veracity of all these true points.
But I'm a bit disappointed in you not having any sort of conclusion here. Especially for the broader public, my experience is that leaving things at "it's complicated" is never a good idea.
As I've written before (https://www.popularbydesign.org/p/immigration-is-not-a-thing-that-has), there's plenty of evidence strongly suggesting that some types of immigration (young, male, low-educated, arriving under asylum or illegal entry) are involved in crime, so you can't just brush it aside. The question people are usually interested in is not whether an exogenous increase in immigration in general raises crime in a particular area, but whether admitting a certain number of young asylum seekers from a particular region will make their country safer or not. That's a different thing altogether. So I do want to push you a bit on having the courage to say what you think we should actually do about any of this :)
P.S. Also, I see a potential Lauren Gilbert erasure: https://www.laurenpolicy.com/p/immigration-and-crime-in-europe
Thanks, Alexander! It’s true that I don’t have a strong (or even any sort of) conclusion. I guess I’m just a weird guy who is almost wholly oblivious to actual policy and “what we should do.” Instead, virtually everything I write about and research starts out with me really not having a clue what the facts on the ground are. Not knowing frustrates me a ton. So, I’m moved to review the evidence, try to reconcile apparent contradictions, and just provide (mostly for myself!) an overarching empirical/descriptive picture on the topic. This brings me great satisfaction, and so I usually leave it at that. :D Hopefully, other people learn something new in the process as well.
In principle, of course, what most people are interested is, “Yeah, sure, but what do we do about it?” But such normativity, especially when things are controversial and complicated and messy, is just not my jam. So, sorry to partially disappoint, but I really haven’t a clue what we should do. I really hate politics to my core, as former activists tend to do, I guess.
Sure, I could give you some platitudes, like “we have to do more policing” and “we have to try to be more selective in who we let in.” But even here, there are immediately two normative commitments that jostle inside of me. I’m very libertarian-leaning, just on principle, when it come to national borders (otherwise, I’m a vanilla left-liberal). Not only am I not a nationalist, but borders just seem insane to me from a certain vantage point. So I want to scream “open borders” from one side of my mouth, maybe. At the same time, being a pragmatist, I realize the existing world is strongly shaped by national borders, and I know that most people sperg out about their nationality and borders. So I want to respect that (kinda), especially when things like crime are thrown about.
Then again (as you can clearly see), I’m just really not a normativity/policy kind of guy! I want to crunch the numbers and read studies, and that’s it. Sorry. :P
PS: The Gilbert review seems very good and useful!
I'm going to comment on the area I know something about: Swedish crime stats.
Firstly, the number of foreign borns in Swedish prisons is unknown, because they don't want to do statistics on it. One estimate is that 70-80% of the prison population has "foreign background". (foreign born or with both parents being foreign born)
The number 24% is how many prisoners that have foreign citizenship.
Secondly, the crime rates for some groups is a lot higher than x3. Here is a screenshot from a report by the Crime Prevention Agency. https://postimg.cc/G9CbWPPX It is not translated but I can explain that men, age 15 and above, born in North Africa, 24% were suspected of a crime. In second generation it is 30%.
East Africa and Other Africa have almost identical numbers.
This can't just be explained away by saying that suspicion is not the same as convictions, age, socioeconomy, racism or what not. There are clear and indisputable differences, and the rate for those nations is x10 that of those with native background.
30% suspected of crime is not a tiny minority, it's a significant amount.
As for Jerzy Sarnecki, he has since the 1980s done research with the purpose of proving that immigration cannot possibly increase crime, in such a stubborn way that he has become a meme.
The flaw in adjusting for income, education and socioeconomy is that criminal people tend to be poor and uneducated. They tend to live in poor areas and surround themselves with similar individuals. If we adjust for poverty, we could claim that no one has any overrepresention. We could bring in a million illiterates and have soaring crime rates, and yet claim that "adjusted for education, crime rates have not increased".
Doesn't Stockholm have a ton of bombings now?
The new government has helped lower the bombings. It was a bomb-wave 3 years ago or so, but they put lots of people in jail and it cooled things down.
Good to hear.
RE: your final point.
That is addressed in the post. The point is most people actually don't care about crime rates among low-educated or poor people, they're focused on ethnicity.
Speaking of which... curious you know so much about this...
The Swedish government didn’t want to produce accurate facts for around 15 years (2004-2021 ca) , so everyone in the “hate” groups had to try and figure it out themselves. I wrote a lot on Quora about it around 2020.
So in your own telling the interest in crime was downstream of animus toward foreigners.
It’s important to know the effects political decisions have.
For example, if we cut down all trees in our country, what would happen?
If we take in one million Arabs and Africans, what will happen?
Stuff like that.
🕳️
Hein de Haas? Really? I'm Dutch. De Haas, along with his far left comrade Leo Lucassen did their best to smear a data filled book by mathematician and anthropologist Jan van de Beek.
https://x.com/demo_demo_nl/status/1857759508967174386
They identified a racist, islamophobe etc. Unfortunately V de Beek could back up every claim with data. Hein de Haas apologized and literally left the debate while his book can be considered more opinion than anything else. Lucassen is worse and a more fanatical ideologue and islamophobe hunter.
The director of the Dutch national statistics bureau (CBS) called him a charlatan. Not surprisingly because there ideology has replaced reality as well. But he also had to apologise after he was proven wrong.
Jan v de Beek:
'In 2022, Statistics Netherlands (CBS) stopped publishing figures on sexual offenses by migration background and made the old figures difficult to find on their website.
Those figures show that non-Western men (12–45 years) are 2 to 5 times more likely to be suspects than native Dutch men.' https://x.com/demo_demo_nl/status/1959206301164257536
The above link provides data on Dutch suspects of rape by nationality/ethnicity. It suggests woke women have their fear of The Patriarchy a tad misaligned geographically...
Anyway, already before V de Beek's book we had plenty experience and data in the Netherlands:
Moroccans are 1/36 of the Dutch population. They produce 50% of crime, and have been overrepresented since the 80s, literally as soon as guest workers began to bring in their families and thus sons. By the age of 21 more than 50% of Moroccan males have had ‘contact’ i.e. is known to the police.
As for the 'it's because young men are overrepresented' argument: that doesn't hold at all. Regular immigrants from N Africa, the Middle East (or West Asia as the Neat Left prefers iit, including the Dutch ministry of education since 2 months), Afghanistan etc can all bring their family. Just like asylum seekers ( 80% are accepted). Somalis bring 6 family members over, Syrians 4 und so wieter und so fort.
The economic argument 'crime is caused by poverty' I buy even less: replace Moroccan, Somali or Caribbean immigrants with Chinese, Indian or Ghanaian immigrants, put them in the exact same economic circumstances, and you'll see crime rates plummet to below average, just like welfare take up.
This is one of the best break downs with plenty of data and charts of European vs American immigration:
The Mirage of America's Special Sauce Theory Philippe Lemoine
https://www.philippelemoine.com/p/the-mirage-of-americas-special-sauce
On #3, the correlation across the whole OECD is pretty useless. Much of Western Europe has homicide rates around 1/100k, what the plot shows is just what happened to murder rates in the US, not anything informative about Europe.
That’s incredibly and at least doubly wrong.
Re: “what the plot shows is just what happened to murder rates in the US”
No, the US is contributing 1/38 to the graph both in terms of homicides and immigrant stock. Including or excluding the US is immaterial.
OECD with US: 5.95/100k to 3.18, change -2.76
OECD without US: 5.86/100k to 3.07, change -2.79
Re: “not anything informative about Europe”
When I restrict the sample only to European countries, the graph looks virtually identical. Homicide rates were around 8/100k around the year 2000 for Europe in general, and they’re now down to around 2/100k.
Or if you’re interested in the European Union specifically, where most of the immigration debate is happening, homicide was around 4.5/100k in 1995, while it’s around 1.25/100k today. (Foreign-born share increased from 8% to 16% in the meantime.) The correlation is thus exactly what we see on the graph, regardless of how we move around countries (let alone the US, which is not important at all).
The only part of your statement that is vaguely on the right track is where you stated that Western Europe has homicide rates around 1/100k. Even there, it declined from almost 2/100k during the mid-1990s, so homicide basically halved even in Western Europe during the past few decades.
Sheesh!
Thank you for the numbers, that is indeed interesting.
But my point is, clearly the original graph doesn't show that? I know immigrants commit less crime than natives in the US, and I have no idea about the numbers in Mexico or Columbia or South Korea. But the point about immigration is that lots of things depend on the country, so to disprove "immigration increased the homicide rate in rich European countries", you need to actually show the data for rich European countries. That Europe indeed had a similar decline has nothing to do with whether your graph shows that or not.
I'm sure you know about Simpson's paradox, so I'd say you should at least group similar countries instead of using all of them, that just seems a bit pointless. From the aggregate I can't tell if this is true for every country, or whether Germany got the immigrants and Poland had the homicide decline.
I commend the intention, but I think many will be unconvinced. Mainly because there is no subdivision of “immigrant”. People with backgrounds rom some countries are overrepresented, whereas others are underrepresented.
In addition, some minor things. The cartoon says violence, the graph says homicide. On the Swedish crime rate: methodologically, correcting for income, education and municipality is not necessarily “correct”, these might correlate with crime, but again, certain national backgrounds pursue education more than others.
Lastly, you write: “They found that Swedish municipalities generally saw violent crime rise from 2000 to 2020, but that rise did not track with the share of residents born abroad”. Here you use the term “residents born abroad”, which I suspect is not the same definition you use other places, and I think you should have begun with defining an immigrant.
No subdivision of “immigrant”? What do you mean?
Depending on data availability, I tackle everything: immigrants in general, non-EU immigrants, refugees (!), and specifically immigrants from various regions of the world (including Africa or, say, East Asia). Of course, I don’t cover all of those under each of the 5 points. But that’s just due to data availability. We simply don’t have fine-grained immigrant distinctions at the country level. At the region level, data exist for all immigrants and non-EU immigrants. At the individual level (Scandinavia), there’s fine-grained data for immigrants from various parts of the world. In any case, I report all of these, wherever possible.
I suspect you didn’t read the piece carefully.
I did read it. Sure, I could have been less categorical, but as far as I can tell you only briefly mention it in point 2, it does not constitute a substantial part of your analysis. My point is simply that few people oppose immigration completely, most would welcome what they view as contributors, often defined in terms of economics. Not differentiating immigrants to a larger extent thus leaves the fundamental basis for opposition to certain groups of immigrants unanswered.
“Hence, even when some groups do contain higher absolute, individual numbers of criminals (which is of course important to know), the share of criminals within that group is very likely to still be small, overall. That means that any aggregate impact at the population level will also be small.”
No, it does not mean that. The “aggregate impact at the population level“ is not determined by the ratio of criminal immigrants to non-criminal immigrants, but by the ratio of criminal immigrants to total residents (native and immigrant).
If 1,000 Ruritanians enter the country and each of them commits a crime, the Ruritanian crime rate is 100% and 1000 crimes have been committed. If 100,000 Ruritanians enter the country and 1000 of them commit crimes, the Ruritanian crime rate is 1% and 1000 crimes have been committed. Both of these scenarios have the same impact on aggregate crime. The number of decent, honest, hard-working Ruritanian who have entered the country alongside their criminal compatriots has no impact whatsoever on aggregate crime.
One thing I don't understand about this sort of analysis is controlling for socioeconomic variables in crime. It is obvious that when compare two groups with the same wealth, intelligence, gender, age they will have a similar crime rate regardless if they are an immigrant or not. I don't think anyone is arguing that simply being an immigrant automatically make someone more prone to crime.
The issue is immigration policies that are importing people from these crime-prone demographics instead of importing higher quality immigrants. This is evidenced by the fact that certain immigrant groups from africa commit crime at a higher rate than the native population and are overrepresented in prisons.
A lot of people argue that being from a different non western culture is the real issue and that's the cause of crime. It's not obvious at all that demographics would exhaust the explanation for crime.
Key thing to control for is male populations between 15 and 25 (or 30). As immigration adds to that demographic, we should say m separate two effects: demographic shift effect and something about mix of that demographic (immigrant share of that demographic). This all seems doable from demographic data. Since the share of native born young men is falling, foreign born young men are committing a meaningful share of crimes.
Did anyone notice that homocide levels plateaued? Probably just a coincidence.
Not really:
Medical advances mask epidemic of violence by cutting murder rate
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1124155/
My point is that homocide rates were falling and that they stopped falling coincides with the rise in immigration.
You literally did the meme. :D
You'd need to explain that to me. I am simple. I'm an immigrant. I went from the rich part of the world to a poor one. I integrated. I was poor when I left and I'm still poor now. Fortunately for me there's no welfare here. Finding a job has been hard, still is after 20 years. When I cast my gaze back towards the UK I left all I see is chaos that wasn't there before. It isn't ever going to get better.
So explain the meme. I don't get it. Or not, I don't care really. Life is peaceful, stable and I have the beach 200 metres away. I don't currently have to worry about the same things that they have to in Europe.
I see. My point was that many murders are turned into assaults by the success of western medics. So imo there is, underneath, no plateauing (in the positive sense) of serious violence.
As for immigrants and crime/murder: different immigrant groups have very different crime- and murder rates. Overall a nation's murder rate can decline while looking more granular shows that a specific immigrant segment is above average. Overall Muslim immigrants are less than 10% of the Dutch populace but the practice of honor killing has them overrepresented @ femicide for instance. Progressives are so troubled by this as they want everybody to unconditionally celebrate foreign cultures that they prefer to discuss it as little as possible.
Ok understood. It appeared like you were making contradictory points but I do understand. Mine was the point that while the rate is not going up, it is not going down AND, it was going down and stopped. This seems to not be that popular an opinion and I apparently did some meme whatever is meant by that. I know what a meme is btw, just not the one I am supposed to have done.
I'm not concerned with memes either. But he is a young sociologist:. And apparently, these days, even sociologists allow themselves the title ‘quantative’. (‘data-driven’ in the private sector, we all have our buzzwords): https://sites.google.com/view/tibor-rutar/home
But as you can see from his piece he chooses to not discuss the granular pov. Because there it gets tricky for a progressive. He sticks to the catch all term ‘immigrants’. For my country the Netherlands that means hundreds of thousands of West- and South European, East Asian and American expats and students with below average crime stats. A few hundred thousand Eastern Europeans of whom some nationalities have above average crime stats and others don’t. Around 400.000 immigrants come from the former colony of Surinam. The Hindu segment has extremely low crime stats, the creoles have above average stats. Then there are the immigrants from Dutch Caribbean islands who have very high crime stats. And finally there are immigrants and illegals from N Africa, Somalia, the Middle East and Afghanistan with above average to hysterical crime stats.
From Dutch stats, but also from other European countries, it’s clear males from N Africa, the Middle East and Afghanistan lead the sexual crime stats. Absolutely not surprising thinking of home-cultures and their view of western women. Somalis in my country are 22 x often suspected of rape. And asylum may be dominated by young men (why would that be?) but as soon as you have your status you can bring your family. Somalis bring on average 6 family members.
Let’s finish on a positive note: not in print anymore and very expensive second hand, but here as a free pdf, the classic by Polish immigrant Stanislav Andreski (ww2 soldier who fought the Soviets, the Germans, escaped to the UK and did not want to return to communist Poland)
Social Sciences as Sorcery
https://gwern.net/doc/statistics/bias/1973-andreski-socialsciencesassorcery.pdf
Thanks for sharing that document.
I think those hostile to (mainly) non-white immigration use false ideas about immigrant crime to bolster their case. However, wokeism has made it much harder to simply say, “We don’t want you because you’re black, brown, etc.” The issue with mass non-white immigration is that many native whites don’t want to be replaced (or reduced to a minority) in their own countries. But, apparently, you’re a bad person if you don’t want this.
TBF it is a bit weird to be that concerned with the skin colour of other citizens of your own country over ... you know... things that are actually relevant to standard of living, such as how those citizens behave.
Not weird at all. People generally prefer their own kind. What’s actually weird is an elite determined (or at least unconcerned) to reduce their native population to minorities in their own countries against the wishes of the natives.
Lot to unpack there! Phew!
Sweden has the most generous system to support young parents of virtually any country.
But let’s blame elites for people not reproducing. 👍
I don’t solely blame elites but are they helping? What are the prevailing ideologies they push? Have they been unabashed pro-natalists for decades prior to pushing for mass non-white immigration? No, they are mainly woke; hence, the problem of Muslim immigration.