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Comment by curtisblaine | Hacker News Reader

It's not going really well, is it? It looks like that every political election in the West is a gigantic plea to end or reduce illegal immigration, yet pretty much every study I see about the correlation between illegal immigrants and crime says that yes, illegal immigrants are overrepresented in crime statistics (mainly an effect of them being younger, male and poorer / less educated in average), but somehow crime rates are unaffected by illegal immigration, and never try to explain the "somehow" (the answer is probably that more crimes go unreported and illegal immigrants are not enough yet to tip the global crime scale). The impression is that investigating these topics in too much detail is frown upon (as in: not good for your career) in academia, and it's always more politically prudent to gloss over them.

(see for example: https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.38.1.181)

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Apparently in the US, illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...

Not sure if it's not good for a scientist's career to study this, seeing as we both just cited a study with minimum effort.

At any rate, New Zealand is not interested in this or any other research, apparently. Which is definitely political-induced blindfolding of society.

Also bad for a scientist's career: when there is zero funding.

The link I posted found illegal immigrants over-represented in crime stats. Again, it can be that some crimes are so widespread that they don't get reported anymore (shoplifting, littering or breach of peace for example).

I mean, it's not a very interesting research topic? People who are poor and young commit certain categories of crime more often. That has nothing to do with immigration or race or whatever.

exactly and it’s fantastic that we have social sciences to prove that there is a correlation between poverty and crime.

otherwise, misrepresentations of issues (like the parents) would be over-represented publicly and not refuted.

(which is important, because tackling crime is only possible if you understand the actual causes themselves.)

I mean, it is? It's the most divisive political topic at the moment and the reason why populisms are on the rise? If anything, I'd expect more and more detailed studies on that?

Trying to prove correlations between race and crime is literally the historical basis of criminology as a discipline. They failed, it's stupid, and now people know better.

You can commission as many studies as you like on astrology, and they'll all be meaningless.

If you read the thread, you will find that this is not about the correlation between race and crime, but about the correlation between illegal immigration and crime.

It has everything to do with illegal immigration because illegal immigration is a constant influx of people that are within the "right" demographics for crime (young, male, less educated, less wealthy etc). If you change the demographics of a country to add poor young people every year, you get a higher incidence of crime by definition.

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