SAN DIEGO — Donald Trump has reached the greatest political heights while linking immigration to violent crime, but he’s hardly the first American politician to promote the unfounded narrative.
Historians go back to at least the 1850s when German and Irish immigrants were targeted as degenerate thieves. An undercurrent of popular belief that immigrants breed crime persisted through the 20th century and into the 21st.
But no one compares to Trump, who reached the pinnacle of power by making immigration a signature issue and portraying the foreign-born as criminals. Yet the weight of evidence shows no support for claims that immigrants are more responsible for crime than native-born Americans.
“As with most things Trump, he’s kind of one-of-a-kind in the loudness and brashness of the views, but he’s also not conjuring out of no history at all,” said Carl Bon Tempo, an immigration historian and associate professor at University at Albany. “This is not coming from nowhere.”
Here is a look at the issue and what studies have shown as Trump prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination for a third time this week in Milwaukee.
Historians trace the narrative to at least the 1850s with the populist Know Nothing movement, also known as the American Party. (Members were required to say “I know nothing” when asked about the party.) The Knights of Labor reached its peak influence in the 1880s by associating immigrants with crime as part of an agenda for workers’ rights.
Fear of crime helped produce laws in the 1880s against Chinese immigration and in the 1920s that sharply limited new arrivals outside of Western Europe for four decades.
The high-level Dillingham Commission produced a 41-volume report in 1911 that found the government wasn’t doing enough to keep out criminal immigrants, reflecting views that other countries were sending America their worst. The Wickersham Commission, in another widely anticipated government report in 1931, noted the theory that immigration fuels crime is “almost as old as the colonies planted by Englishmen on the New England coast.”
Albert Johnson, a Republican newspaper editor who represented a Washington state congressional district, authored a 1924 law that severely restricted arrivals from outside Western Europe amid deep public anxiety about immigration. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democratic governor and U.S. senator from South Carolina who advocated lynching Blacks, spearheaded a law that made illegal entry a misdemeanor crime in 1929.
Crime has been an underlying fear even as politicians raised other objections to immigration. In the 1990s, Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan spoke of an “illegal invasion” and focused on cultural issues. California Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, dwelled on the idea that American citizens were being robbed of social services when he campaigned for a 1994 ballot measure to prohibit education and health care for people in the county illegally, which was approved by voters but largely thrown out in court.
Tom Tancredo led efforts against illegal immigration as a Republican congressman from Colorado in the 2000s, highlighting that federal prisons housed many who entered the country illegally. “They’re coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren,” he said at a 2005 rally in New Hampshire.
Then there is Trump, who launched his presidential bid in 2015 by saying Mexico is “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump elevated the profile of MS-13, a criminal gang with roots among Salvadoran immigrants, and of “angel families” whose loved ones were killed by people in the country illegally. “For years, their pain was met with silence; their plight was met with indifference,” he told a group of victims’ families at the White House in 2018.
Trump rarely misses an opportunity to connect immigrants to crime, saying without any evidence at last month’s presidential debate that “millions” from prisons, jails and mental health institutions entered the country under Joe Biden’s watch.
The foreign-born population was estimated to be 46.2 million, or almost 14% of the U.S. total, in 2022, according to the Census Bureau, including about 11 million in the country illegally. Hardly a month passes without at least one in the country illegally getting charged with a high-profile, horrific crime, such as the February slaying of a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student or the strangling death of a 1 2-year-old Houston girl in June.
Trump and his allies describe violent crimes committed by people in the country illegally as preventable acts, especially when an assailant had previous encounters with police in the United States.
A poll in March from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows the share of Americans who say that there’s a major risk that legal immigrants will commit crimes in the U.S. has increased to 32% from 19% in 2017.
Peer-reviewed academic studies have generally found no link between immigration and violent crime, though conclusions vary based on the data examined.
The perception that immigration breeds crime “continues to falter under the weight of the evidence,” according to a review of academic literature last year in the Annual Review of Criminology. “With few exceptions, studies conducted at both the aggregate and individual levels demonstrate that high concentrations of immigrants are not associated with increased levels of crime and delinquency across neighborhoods and cities in the United States.”
Another review of academic studies from 1994 to 2014 in the same journal found that the most common conclusion was “a null or nonsignificant association between immigration and crime.” Studies that established a link tended to say that immigration leads to less crime, not more.
Texas is the only state to track crimes by immigration status. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences, based on Texas Department of Public Safety data from 2012 to 2018, found people in the country illegally had “substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses.”
“There’s a lot of research on immigration and crime, there’s far less on undocumented immigration and crime,” said Michael Light, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and co-author of the study on Texas data.
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