Cato says illegal immigrants commit less crime — Bill Melugin brings some VERY ugly receipts

BS BULLETIN

Cato’s David Bier argues illegal immigrants commit serious crimes at substantially lower rates than native-born Americans.
Bill Melugin countered with the case of an illegal Cuban migrant accused of pouring hot wax on her child and setting a fire with her children inside the home.
The real argument: Does a lower statistical crime rate answer the policy question of crimes committed by people who weren’t legally supposed to be here?

Fox News border correspondent Bill Melugin and Cato Institute immigration policy director David Bier are at it again.

And this time, their argument goes straight to one of the fundamental disagreements in America’s immigration debate.

Bier has been hammering the point that illegal immigrants are statistically less likely to commit serious crimes than native-born Americans. Cato’s latest analysis estimates an incarceration rate of 674 per 100,000 illegal immigrants compared with 1,195 per 100,000 native-born Americans.

Bier concludes that portraying illegal immigration as a major crime threat is statistically misleading and that mass deportation would do little to reduce America’s overall crime rate. In congressional testimony this year, he went further, arguing that immigrants and noncitizens actually reduce Americans’ likelihood of becoming crime victims.

Melugin has a rather different way of looking at it. He pointed Friday to the case of Meliza Campos-Sanchez, a 26-year-old Cuban national now facing horrifying allegations in Miami-Dade County.

Police say Campos-Sanchez filmed herself pouring hot candle wax on her two daughters, ages 3 and 6, and intentionally setting clothing ablaze inside the family’s kitchen while the children were in the home. Her six-year-old daughter told investigators that she eventually used water to extinguish the fire.

Campos-Sanchez faces first-degree arson, child abuse, and two counts of child neglect. A judge ordered her to stay away from her daughters and undergo mental-health evaluations. She has not been convicted and is entitled to the presumption of innocence.

DHS says Campos-Sanchez entered the United States illegally through Florida in May 2022, during the Biden administration, and ICE has now lodged a detainer requesting custody if local authorities release her.

That prompted Melugin to challenge Bier’s statistical argument. The two men are essentially arguing past one another — because they’re asking different questions.

Bier’s question is: Are illegal immigrants, as a population, more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans? Cato’s data says no.

Melugin’s question is: Why should Americans accept even one serious crime committed by somebody who entered the country illegally and therefore could have been prevented from being here in the first place?

And that is considerably harder to answer with a spreadsheet.

Bier recently made his position especially clear while challenging Trump’s estimates of the illegal immigrant population. He argued that even if the population were much larger than generally estimated, mass deportation would still be misguided because illegal immigrants have lower crime rates and millions live in households with American citizens.

Melugin has repeatedly pushed back on that reasoning, particularly when individual crimes involve migrants released into the country under Biden-era policies.

Earlier this year, the two sparred after Venezuelan migrant Eiker Requiz Castro was accused of murdering Loyola University student Sheridan Gorman in Chicago. Bier faulted the Trump administration for failing to arrest Castro under the Laken Riley Act; Melugin responded that Castro had originally been released into the country under Biden and that Chicago’s sanctuary policies obstructed cooperation with ICE.

That argument gets us to the issue that crime-rate comparisons don’t settle. Native-born Americans who commit crimes are Americans. The government cannot prevent them from being in America. Someone who entered illegally presents an entirely different policy question.

The government had a legal mechanism for keeping that person outside the country. That doesn’t mean every illegal immigrant is dangerous. Obviously not. It means Americans are perfectly entitled to ask why their government should accept any additional preventable crime as the price of failing to enforce immigration law.

MY QUICK TAKE

Here is where statistics become a marvelous way of avoiding the question somebody actually asked.

Suppose somebody breaks into your house, moves into the basement and announces: “Relax. Statistically, burglars who move into basements commit fewer crimes than homeowners.”

Terrific. GET OUT OF MY BASEMENT.

David Bier may be absolutely correct about the relative crime rates. That’s a legitimate statistical question, and conservatives shouldn’t pretend data doesn’t exist simply because we don’t like an argument.

But Bill Melugin is making a different point. If an American citizen commits a horrible crime, America is stuck with him. If somebody enters the country illegally and then commits a horrible crime, Americans quite reasonably ask: Why was this person here?

And telling the victim’s family that another demographic group has a higher per-capita incarceration rate isn’t exactly going to knock their socks off. A crime that never should have happened doesn’t become less tragic because the spreadsheet says the average looks pretty good.

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