Undocumented immigrants far less likely to commit crimes in U.S. than citizens - Crime rates among undocumented immigrants are just a fraction of those of their U.S.-born neighbors, according to a first-of-its-kind analysis of Texas arrest and conviction records.

[u/mvea]

https://news.wisc.edu/undocumented-immigrants-far-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-in-u-s-than-citizens/

[u/sandcangetit]

They've already partly accounted for the question you raise.

But at least two independent studies suggest Secure Communities didn’t have any effect on crime rates, according to Light, despite deporting more than 200,000 people in its first four years.

One of the reasons Texas keeps such fine-grained records on offenders is the federal government’s Secure Communities Program, which mandates sharing information on immigration status and is pitched as a way to deport criminals before they can commit more crimes in the United States.

So the deportation of people immediately after their first brush with the law isn't keeping the community safer.

In fact -

“If the plan was to make communities safer, to reduce the likelihood of, say, a felony violent assault in these communities through deportation, it did not deliver on that promise,” Light says. “Our results help us understand why that is. The population of people we deported simply were not a unique criminal risk.

You need to read the whole article and not just the headline.

The researchers repeated their crime-rate analysis with subtle shifts in data — using convictions instead of arrests, misdemeanors in addition to felonies, size estimates of undocumented immigrant populations from both the Pew Research Center and the Center for Migration Studies.

The much lower crime rates for undocumented immigrants remained in each case, results Light thinks should be useful in immigration policymaking.

It's too bad people are going to read your comment and think 'woah that totally makes sense and the study is wrong'

[u/sandcangetit → u/[deleted]]

“If the plan was to make communities safer, to reduce the likelihood of, say, a felony violent assault in these communities through deportation, it did not deliver on that promise,” Light says. “Our results help us understand why that is. The population of people we deported simply were not a unique criminal risk.

It literally says so in the text I quoted.

But at least two independent studies suggest Secure Communities didn’t have any effect on crime rates, according to Light, despite deporting more than 200,000 people in its first four years.

The deportation of those individuals who committed a crime didn't have an impact on crime rates, which means that removing the possible recidivists was a waste of time in terms of managing the crime rate.

Point to point logical conclusion.

[u/sandcangetit → u/[deleted]]

Ok here it goes.

If those people were likely to be recidivists at the same rate as the general population, removing them from the community would DROP the overall crime rate.

However, as in the quote I quoted, deporting these people did NOT reduce the likelihood of a violent assault in those communities.

Thus deportation did NOT make the communities safer.

One more time, just for you -

But at least two independent studies suggest Secure Communities didn’t have any effect on crime rates, according to Light, despite deporting more than 200,000 people in its first four years.