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Comment by Udik | Hacker News Reader

> Both illegal and legal immigrant groups have lower incarceration rates than native born Americans. So, whenever a right-wing pundit says that immigration is to blame for crime rising, there likely is statistical fuckery or outright lies.

I needed an example and honestly made up one- I had no idea of the situation in the US and I find these statistics very interesting, thanks!

The reason I chose this particular example is because in Italy- where I'm from- the statistics are the total opposite: more than 1/3 of all inmates are foreigners, with some ethnicities wildly over-represented in proportion to their share in the population. The connection between immigration and crime rates is one of the most used right-wing arguments and topic of contention between left and right in Italy.

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The figures for Italy are skewed by pre-trial detention, which is disproportionately applied to immigrants:

https://openmigration.org/en/op-ed/foreign-detainees-in-euro....

Slightly skewed. According to ISTAT, Italy's official statistics agency, foreigners are 32.6% of people convicted for any crime and almost 37% of the inmates population.

https://www.istat.it/it/immigrati/prodotti-editoriali/crimin...

According to this article that aims to prove that "immigrants committing more crimes than natives" is fake news,

"On the total of the extra-EU immigrants that are trialed for any crime, the illegal ones are 70% of the total for voluntary causing harm, 75% for homicides, and 85% for burglaries and robberies".

And illegal immigrants are just about 10% of the legal ones.

https://www.fanpage.it/politica/la-grande-bufala-degli-stran...

> According to ISTAT [...] foreigners are 32.6% of people convicted for any crime

I believe that is the figure for prisoners, which includes people in pre-trial detention. The page is very unclear, because the text talks about 'condannati' (which google translate renders, maybe wrongly, as 'prisoners' rather than 'convicts'), but the graph is labelled with 'detenuti', which I think unambiguously includes people who are detained but not convicted.

> I believe that is the figure for prisoners

The text says very clearly: "32.6% of people convicted, 36.7% of prisoners in jails".

The graph is about prisoners, with a break down by area. In my area, foreigners are almost 60% of the jails population!

Using incarceration as a proxy doesn't really help, because there's an inherent bias. Sure the true rate (of committing crimes) is probably also higher (for immigrants than for natives), but we still would have to adjust for socioeconomic status.

Of course, at the same time I have a rather stubborn view on integration (that it's almost non-existent, just as a real social safety net is very thin), and until that gets sorted out I understand people's not so well funded, but still technically rational fears of migrants.

Generally poverty and crime are the two that correlate heavily and so in sectors of the population where you have high levels of poverty then you also have high levels of crime which is why safety nets and welfare are so important for reducing crime.

If you think about immigration that is a subset of the population that have high levels of poverty, low levels of access to welfare and so if things go wrong they get desperate quickly. And they also have more problems than locals at getting work due to discrimination and a host of other reasons.

That might explain why immigrants in that country have higher crime rates but it doesn’t invalidate the point that cutting immigration would be one way to lower crime rates.

But it does invalidate it, as the comment does not attack the cause, it's just blaming an outcome of poverty rather than the poor. It's why often those same commentators blame the poor for being poor rather than attacking structures that continue to trap people in poverty

Cutting poverty is a more effective measure.

Actually I'll go further if you were serious on cutting crime you would be advocating to cut poverty!!

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