Topic: International Economics, Development & Immigration

The Murder of Mollie Tibbetts and Illegal Immigrant Crime: The Facts

By Alex Nowrasteh

Yesterday, authorities in Iowa charged 24-year old Cristhian Bahena Rivera with the murder of Mollie Tibbetts. Facts in these types of cases come out slowly and some details, substantive or minor, may change in the months ahead that could alter the correct view of this case. But nothing can change the fact that the murder of Tibbetts was a brutal and unforgivable act and that the murderer should be punished to the full extent of the law. Rivera is charged with that murder and there is a lot of evidence to support a conviction.    

This terrible murder is already feeding into a political firestorm. People with a political axe to grind, those who want to distract from the recent conviction of Paul Manafort and plea deal for Michael Cohen, and partisans who want to compare Tibbetts’ murder to the shooting of Kate Steinle in an effort to impact the upcoming November elections are already using the tragic murder of Tibbetts as an argument for increasing the enforcement of immigration laws against people who aren’t charged with murder or any real crime except violating international labor market regulations (immigration laws). They want to convict all illegal immigrants of this murder in the court of public opinion, not just the actual murderer.    

Scarce law enforcement resources should be devoted to solving and deterring the most serious crimes regardless of who commits them.  That is the best policy for saving American lives. That means that increased enforcement of our immigration laws is not a good way to prevent murders.  Illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated for crimes in the United States than native-born Americans. Texas is the only state that keeps data on the number of convictions of illegal immigrants for specific crimes (I sent versions of Public Interest Requests to every state). In Texas in 2015, the rate of convictions per 100,000 illegal immigrants was 16 percent lower below that of native-born Americans. That is little consolation to the victims and their families, but the population of illegal immigrants is less likely to be convicted of murder than native-born Americans in Texas. If nationwide incarceration rates by immigration status are any clue, that trend likely holds nationwide. 

I recently received new data from Texas on the number of convictions by crime and immigration status as well as the number of individuals convicted (they are slightly different). This Texas data is the best data that we have on the commission of murder by immigrants by specific legal status.  In 2016, 746 native-born Texans, 32 illegal immigrants, and 28 legal immigrants were convicted of homicide. In that year, the homicide conviction rate for native-born Americans is Texas was 3.2 per 100,000 natives while it was 1.8 per 100,000 illegal immigrants and 0.9 per 100,000 legal immigrants (Figure 1). The illegal immigrant conviction rate for homicide was 44 percent below that of native-born Americans in 2016 in Texas. 

Figure 1: Homicide conviction rates in Texas

To calculate those conviction rates, I used an estimate of the size of the illegal immigrant population in Texas as well as data from the American Community Survey for the number of native-born Americans and legal immigrants. The conviction rates are per each subpopulation of native-born Americans, illegal immigrants, and legal immigrants. Immigration status makes no difference in the reporting of serious crimes like murder or robbery, so these statistics aren’t likely to be biased. Furthermore, states are not likely to turn over illegal immigrants for removal prior to convicting them of serious crimes. 

The Texas homicide conviction rates are consistent with the peer-reviewed evidence on immigrant conviction rates over the last century. Even Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the nativist Center for Immigration Studies, admits that “A lot of data does suggest immigrants are less likely to be involved in crime.”     

Texas isn’t Iowa and the reality in the latter state could be markedly different, but the state of Texas probably represents a near-worst-case scenario because it borders Mexico, has a large illegal immigrant population, is governed by Republicans, did not have any sanctuary jurisdiction in 2016, and has a law and order reputation for severely enforcing its criminal laws.  If there is any state that will find and prosecute illegal immigrants for crime, it’s Texas.  It should be strong evidence that the illegal immigrant conviction rate for homicide there is so low.

Already, I can hear people objecting by stating “you don’t know the size of the illegal immigrant population, so it’s just an estimate.” They are correct but virtually everybody who disagrees with the estimated size of the illegal immigrant population, which all cluster around the same number regardless of the organization doing the estimating, assumes that there are more illegal immigrants than are commonly estimated.

The real number of illegal immigrants isn’t too far off from the accepted estimates but if those critics are correct and demographers are missing a large number of them, that means that illegal immigrant crime and homicide rates are even lower than reported here and elsewhere (the denominator increases but the numerator stays the same). Ann Coulter wrote that there are 36 million illegal immigrants in her best-selling book on immigration. If she turns out to be correct and those 36 million illegal immigrants are distributed across the United States just as they are now, meaning that there are about 5.8 million in Texas, then the illegal immigrant homicide rate in 2016 was actual 0.56 per 100,000 illegal immigrants rather than the 1.8 reported here. If Coulter is correct, then she has unwittingly proven that illegal immigrants have the lowest homicide conviction rate of any population in the United States. 

Public policy must be based on data and trends, not on horrific anecdotes like the murder of Mollie Tibbets. Using law enforcement agencies on the local, state, and federal level to deport illegal immigrants who haven’t committed any violent or property crimes as a means to prevent tragic murders is a spectacularly poor way to prevent crime and save American laws. Such a misallocation of government resources will likely result in more victims as the government would spend a lot of resources deporting people who pose no security threat whatsoever and those resources must come from elsewhere, likely from other law enforcement activities. Punish the murderer of Mollie Tibbetts, don’t punish those who share the same immigration status as him from crimes they didn’t commit.        

 

 

 

Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

Results from the 2018 Libertarianism vs. Conservatism Post-Debate Survey

By Emily Ekins

As part of a yearly summer tradition, the Heritage Foundation and Cato Institute co-host a debate in which interns at both think tanks debate whether conservatism or libertarianism is a better ideology. Following this year’s debate, the Cato Institute conducted a post-debate survey of attendees to ask who they thought won the debate and what they believe about a variety of public policy and philosophical issues. The post-debate survey offers a unique opportunity to examine how young leaders in the conservative and libertarian movements approach deep philosophical questions that may be inaccessible to a general audience.

2018 Intern Debate Survey

Despite agreement on domestic economic issues and free trade, the survey finds striking differences between conservative and libertarian  attitudes about Donald Trump, immigration, transgender pronouns, government’s response to opioid addiction, police, defense spending and national security, domestic surveillance, and religion. The survey also went further than just asking about policy and used Jordan Peterson’s 12 principles for a 21st century conservatism to examine the underlying philosophical differences between libertarian and conservative millennials. 

Read the rest of this post »

Topics:
Constitution, Law & Civil Liberties, Foreign Policy and National Security, Government and Politics, International Economics, Development & Immigration, Political Philosophy, Poverty & Social Welfare, Regulatory Studies, Social Security, Tax and Budget Policy, Trade Policy

Trump Should Warn South Africa on Land Expropriations

By Marian L. Tupy

According to press reports, South Africa’s government has begun expropriating privately-owned farmland without financial compensation, thereby ignoring the post-apartheid political settlement, which allows for land redistribution in the country on a “willing buyer, willing seller” basis.

Eighteen years ago, Zimbabwe embraced a similar policy. As a consequence, South Africa’s northern neighbor’s economy collapsed and the country descended into penury and political violence. This scenario is likely to repeat itself in South Africa. An attack on property rights will result in the destruction of South Africa’s farming community, dramatic reduction in agricultural productivity, and mass unemployment. It could also lead to a collapse of the banking sector (which depends on land as collateral for loan-making) and the local currency, hyperinflation, and even bloodshed.

In the early 1990s, the United States was heavily involved in negotiating the transfer of power from the ruling National Party to the current government, which is composed of the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party. As such, the United States bears some responsibility for ensuring that South Africa’s post-apartheid political settlement, including protection of minorities and private property, endures. President Trump should warn the South African government that if South Africa’s Constitution is amended to allow for expropriation without compensation, South Africa will be suspended from the African Growth and Opportunity Act, as Zimbabwe had been. Moreover, the U.S. Congress should hold hearings on the situation in South Africa, if the government of South Africa continues its destructive economic policies.

Section 104 of AGOA states that a sub-Saharan African country is eligible for membership of AGOA if it “protects private property rights, incorporates an open rules-based trading system, and minimizes government interference in the economy through measures such as price controls, subsidies, and government ownership of economic assets; (b) [respects] the rule of law, political pluralism, and the right to due process, a fair trial, and equal protection under the law.” Furthermore, the text of AGOA states that “If the President determines that an eligible Sub-Saharan African country is not making continual progress in meeting the requirements described in … [Section 104] the President shall terminate the designation of the country [as being eligible for membership of AGOA].” Considering that South Africa is in breach or is about to breach a number of requirements for membership of AGOA, the president should act by issuing a preemptive warning to the South African government.

Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

The Debasement of Human Rights

By Roger Pilon

Back in May I invited Aaron Rhodes to come over from his home in Hamburg, Germany, to talk about his new book from Encounter Books, The Debasement of Human Rights: How Politics Sabotage the Ideal of Freedom. The Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto was in town to interview Rhodes, which he did after our forum. The interview appears in today’s Journal. It’s a tour de force, pulling together the many threads of a huge, complex argument and presenting them in a short, readable format.

If you’ve ever wondered what’s wrong with the UN Human Rights establishment but have never quite been able to put your finger precisely on what it is, this interview will answer many of your questions—and the book will spell out the details. The origins of a world in which dictators sit of the UN Human Rights Council, immune from criticism while condemning free societies, can be found in progressivism’s conflation of natural and positive law, which Franklin Roosevelt mastered with his “Four Freedoms” and his wife Eleanor helped institute in 1948 in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. With that foundation, equating rights to liberty with rights to social security, rest and leisure, periodic holidays with pay, job training, and more, it was only a matter of time before tyrants would find their immunity in their purported provision of such services, invariably at the expense of liberty, leading to the debasement of real rights.

During the Reagan administration I served for a time as director of policy for the State Department’s Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs where I saw human rights hypocrisy up close. During the annual meetings in 1987 in Geneva of what was then the UN Commission on Human Rights, for example, we introduced a resolution condemning Cuba’s human rights record, only to be met with objections from European nations, effectively excusing those abuses by pointing to Cuba’s health care record. With the end of the Cold War, which tended to sharpen the difference between these two kinds of rights, the distinction has become increasingly blurred, as Rhodes explains, drawing on his experience as director of the International Helsinki Federation from 1993 to 2007 and his present position as president of the Forum for Religious Freedom – Europe.

“Can anything be done?” Taranto asks at the end of the interview. “I wish that the Trump administration would talk about human rights once in a while,” Rhodes answers. “They should talk about freedom.” 

Topics:
Constitution, Law & Civil Liberties, International Economics, Development & Immigration

The Chance of Being Murdered or Injured in a Terrorist Attack in the United Kingdom

By Alex Nowrasteh

On Tuesday, a Sudanese immigrant to the United Kingdom named Salih Khater crashed his car into cyclists and pedestrians in a terrorist attack in London. Fortunately, Khater did not murder anybody in his attack but he did injure three pedestrians, one of whom was so lightly wounded that he was treated at the scene and released. The other two wounded people have since been released from the hospital. 

Terrorism has been relatively common in the United Kingdom for decades, from the Irish Republican Army to al Qaeda to ISIS. However, there is little research on the actual risk of a British person being killed or injured in a terrorist attack. This post is an attempt to quantify that risk.

According to data from the Global Terrorism Database at the University of Maryland, the RAND Corporation, and online sources for 2018, terrorists murdered 2,402 people in the United Kingdom from 1975 through August 14, 2018 (Figure 1). Despite increases in the number of murders committed by terrorists in recent years, especially a series of horrible attacks in 2017 that murdered 42 people, the long run trend is a decline in the number of people murdered by terrorists in the United Kingdom. Figure 2 shows that 5,267 people were wounded in terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom during the same period. Figures 1 and 2 only include victims and exclude the terrorists themselves from the death and injury statistics. Using existing data sources, somebody with knowledge and a lot of time could use the GTD and RAND databases to identify the nativity, ideology, and other characteristics of each terrorist like I did for the United States. 

Figure 1: Annual murders committed by terrorists in the United Kingdom
Figure 2: Annual injuries committed by terrorists in the United Kingdom

From 1975 through August 15, 2018, a British person’s chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack on British soil was about 1 in 1.1 million per year.  But that annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack obscures big shifts over time. Over the last decade, the annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack on British soil was about 1 in 11.4 million per year, far lower than the entire 1975-2018 period. Especially relevant is the number of injuries given that Khater only injured people in his attack. The annual chance of being injured over the entire time was 1 in 496,464 per year, but only 1 in 1.4 million per year over the last decade. 

Figure 3 tries to show how the risk has changed over time by using a moving three-year average of the annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack. I used a three-year moving average because zero people were killed by terrorists in many years and one cannot divide by zero. A note about reading Figures 3 and 4: the Y-axis is the annual chance of being murdered or injured in a terrorist attack, so the 2011 number of 63,280,444 in Figure 3 means that the chance of a British person being murdered in a terrorist attack was 1 in 63,280,444 that year. Thus, the higher the number, the lower the chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack. 

Figure 3 shows that the annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack fell rapidly from 1975 through 2004, rose over the next several years, fell again, and has been increasing since about 2012. Dropping the moving gives sharper divides: In 2016, 2017, and 2018 (so far), the annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack was about 1 in 7.3 million per year, 1 in 1.8 million per year, and zero (so far), respectively. 

Figure 3: Annual chance of being murdered in a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom

Figure 4 shows a similar decline in injuries inflicted by terrorists from 1975 through 2003 that abruptly reverses in 2004, falls again in the following years, and then starts to increase over the last few years. 

Figure 4: Annual chance of being injured in a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom

These above figures show that the chance of dying or being injured in a terrorist attack in the United Kingdom is small. Yet terrorism succeeds in terrifying people. None of the numbers above would give comfort to the actual victims of terrorism or their families because what happened to them is the equivalent of “winning” an evil anti-lottery. But the above numbers should show British citizens, their government, and the world at large that terrorism is a relatively small problem in the United Kingdom.    

Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

The California TRUST Act Reduced Deportations

By Alex Nowrasteh and Andrew Forrester

Sanctuary policies on the city, county, and state level are frequently in the news.  Opponents claim that they increase crime in jurisdictions while proponents claim that they allow illegal immigrants, their families, and their American neighbors to rest a little easier knowing that the local government won’t help the federal government enforce its immigration laws.  Both sides assume that sanctuary policies produce those results by decreasing the scope and scale of immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions that, in turn, reduce the number of deportations from there.

There are undoubtedly individual cases where a sanctuary policy helps a person avoid deportation, but the more important question is whether they reduce deportations overall.  If there isn’t much of an impact, then the debate over sanctuary policies is just a costly diversion from other issues.  However, if sanctuary policies do reduce deportations, then perhaps pro-immigration activists and policy-makers should devote more effort to increase their number.  Likewise, opponents of sanctuary policies should also stop opposing them if they don’t have an impact on deportations but expand their opposition if they do reduce deportations by a lot  

There is suggestive evidence that sanctuary policies reduce deportations but many reasons to also be skeptical of big effects.  We decided to look at how the California TRUST Act reduced deportations from California.  Governor Jerry Brown (D) signed the TRUST Act in October 2013 – the beginning of the fiscal year for 2014.  The TRUST Act was a state-level sanctuary policy that limited law enforcement cooperation with ICE unless the arrestee had already been convicted of serious crimes. 

ICE deports people apprehended in specific Areas of Responsibility (AOR).  There are three AORs that include the states of California and Hawaii.  For the purposes of this blog, we assumed that Hawaii was not part of the California AORs.  According to the Center for Migration Studies, Hawaii’s illegal immigrant population was under 40,000 in 2015 while California’s was almost 2.6 million.  Since Hawaii’s illegal immigrant population was only 1.5 percent of California’s, we were comfortable in ignoring it.

Figure 1 shows a steep relative decline in deportations from the California AOR relative to the rest of the country when the TRUST Act was enacted.  In FY2014, the first year that the TRUST Act was in effect, deportations from California dropped 39 percent relative to FY2013.  In the rest of the country in FY2014, they only dropped 9 percent relative to FY2013. 

Figure 1

Annual Percentage Change in Removals by AOR

 

Sources: ICE and authors’ calculations. 

 

Figure 2 shows the differences in removal trends before and after California’s TRUST Act became law relative to the other AORs that were not covered by the California law.  Each regression line fit to the pre- and post-TRUST Act, called “Fitted Values,” highlights the change from a steady increase in the number of removals from California’s AOR to a precipitous decline in the number of removals when the TRUST Act became law. 

 

Figure 2

California Deportation Trends Pre- and Post-TRUST Act

 

Sources:  ICE and authors’ calculations.

 

On a statistical basis, these findings are merely suggestive as we only have 12 years of data and we didn’t control for any other factors.  For Figure 2, it appears that the more substantive change transpired in FY2012 prior to the TRUST Act.  Regardless, this simple exercise strongly suggests that the California TRUST Act caused the number of deportations from California to fall faster than they otherwise would have relative to other AORs. 

Topics:
International Economics, Development & Immigration

Socialist Experiments

By David Boaz

In the summer of 1982, after the Cato Institute’s week-long seminar at Dartmouth, I drove to Boston with one of the other attendees. Touring the city, we encountered a protest rally on Boston Common. I don’t remember just what the rally was about – probably the “nuclear freeze” or a general protest against nuclear weapons, which was a strong movement then. As we watched, a young woman approached and handed us flyers calling for socialism. “Like in Russia and China?” I asked her. Unwilling to defend those disastrous results, she responded “We’re more interested in the experiments currently going on in Zimbabwe and Nicaragua.” I knew very little about those “experiments” and had nothing much to say.

Paramilitary members in Monimbo, Nicaragua

Now, though, 36 years later, we know a great deal about those experiments in socialism. The photograph at right appears on the front page of Friday’s Washington Post with the caption “Paramilitary members stand guard on July 17 at a dismantled barricade after police and pro-government forces stormed the Monimbo neighborhood of Masaya, Nicaragua, which had become a center of resistance.”

I was reminded of something very candid that the socialist economist Robert Heilbroner wrote: that socialism depends on central planning and a collective moral commitment and thus on command and obedience to the plan. And that means that “The rights of individuals to their Millian liberties [are] directly opposed to the basic social commitment to a deliberately embraced collective moral goal… Under socialism, every dissenting voice raises a threat similar to that raised under a democracy by those who preach antidemocracy.” Democratic liberties like free speech and free press are an inherent threat to the planners’ control.

And of course Zimbabwe suffered for some 37 years under the increasingly authoritarian rule of Robert Mugabe, which may or may not have changed with Mugabe’s replacement by his vice president. 

Consider not just democracy but standard of living. In the 36 years since I had that conversation, Nicaragua has been under the rule of socialist Daniel Ortega for about half that time, and Zimbabwe under Mugabe for the entire period. Nicaragua’s GDP per capita is the lowest in Central America – far below market-liberal Costa Rica and 50 percent below war-torn Honduras. Zimbabwe is even poorer. These aren’t just numbers. They indicate how people live. They tell us that in 2018, in a world growing rapidly richer, where poverty is plummeting, people in these countries remain desperately in need of businesses, jobs, food, and medicine. 

I wonder if my socialist interlocutor from 1982 is still interested in the socialist experiments in Nicaragua and Zimbabwe. 

Footnote: Kristian Niemetz of IEA wrote about how socialist “experiments” always become embarrassing after a few years. Except for “very short-lived experiments, such as the Paris Commune…. Those are the Jim Morrisons of socialism. They ended before they could turn into embarrassments.”

Topics:
Government and Politics, International Economics, Development & Immigration, Political Philosophy

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