PorkChop wrote:Do sanctuary cities have more crime?
I'm curious to see the numbers. People that come from all around the world take with them their way of life. It's not like they leave their way of living behind when they come here. Treatment of women and violence in poor countries is far worse than what we see here. People coming from a place where they had nothing only to come here where they still have nothing but everything costs a whole lot more is gonna cause problems.
Come here with nothing and you'll find yourself more poor than where you came from.
Pork, I'm going to respectfully push back on a couple of points here.
First, for the most direct response to your suggestion, according to Wikipedia, "Studies on the relationship between sanctuary status and crime have found that sanctuary policies either have no effect on crime or that sanctuary cities have lower crime rates and stronger economies than comparable non-sanctuary cities.[5][6][7][8]."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanctuary_city
There are four footnotes there, so you're welcome to go check out those studies. If they are correct, you might think the studies actually imply the opposite argument than the one you're making--that sanctuary policies actually
lower the crime rate.
I'm dubious that there is a causal relationship there, just as I'm skeptical that the causal relationship you imply is real as well. I don't think sanctuary policies either lower or raise the crime rate.
But crime rates are tricky data to start with, and can depend quite a bit on how you measure them or how many crimes are being reported, investigated by the police, or prosecuted. It even depends on how the boundaries of cities are drawn because the rates are measured per population. The FBI does provide some of this information, but according to Wikipedia, "The FBI web site recommends against using its data for ranking because these rankings lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting cities and counties, along with their residents.[4] The FBI web site also recommends against using its data to judge how effective law enforcement agencies are, since there are many factors that influence crime rates other than law enforcement.[5]"
For the sake of discussion though, here's one place where you can see this data in a sortable fashion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_crime_rate
Again, we should take all of this data with a big grain of salt, I'm not even sure if this data is for reported crimes or for crimes which resulted in a conviction. But you can go ahead and click on each crime to rank them by rate. For example, here are the rankings for the highest crime rates in relation to population for select crimes.
Murder/Manslaughter
1. St. Louis
2. Baltimore
3. Detroit
4. New Orleans
5. Baton Rouge
6. Kansas City
7. Cleveland
8. Memphis
9. Newark
10. Chicago
Rape
1. New Orleans
2. Anchorage
3. Cleveland
4. Minneapolis
5. Spokane
6. Columbus
7. Tulsa
8. Detroit
9. Colorado Springs
10. Denver
Robbery
1. Baltimore
2. Cleveland
3. Oakland
4. St. Louis
5. Memphis
6. Albuquerque
7. Milwaukee
8. Chicago
9. Minneapolis
10. Houston
You can also rank by categories like violent crime and property crime. I just listed the first few violent categories they had.
In terms of sanctuary cities and crime, I'd also be curious to check out those studies, but even if we could confidently see a pattern of higher or lower crime rates in sanctuary cities, I think we need to be careful not to conflate correlation with causation. Could there be a causal relationship? Potentially. But even if we could confidently say there were higher or lower crime rates in sanctuary cities, that wouldn't necessarily prove that sanctuary policies are the cause of those higher or lower crime rates.
The other problem with arguing that sanctuary cities raise crime, which is your implication, is that the label "sanctuary city" oversimplifies the very different policies that different cities have toward illegal immigration. Some cooperate with ICE for convicted felons, some don't. Some do for accused felons, some don't. Some cooperate with people convicted of misdemeanors, some don't. Some actively try to prevent ICE raids in their cities, others don't go that far but refuse to turn over information to ICE, and the information that they may refuse to turn over varies from city to city. And some have officially stated policies, while in practice, the policies are actually pretty different. In other words, just like it's really hard to define a crime rate, labeling something a sanctuary city or not really oversimplifies things.
So, to recap:
1. The studies that have been done on this suggest there is no correlation or even that crime is lower in sanctuary cities, which is the opposite of what you're implying, Pork.
But I'd take any conclusion about any possible relationship between sanctuary cities and crime with a huge grain of salt because of the following:
2. Crime rates are dubious data to start with.
3. Labeling something a sanctuary city or not vastly oversimplifies the reality of policies on the ground.
4. Even if there IS a correlation between sanctuary policies and crime rates, that doesn't prove there is any causal relationship, which is what you are implying Pork.
And that's the last thing I'd like to turn to. You suggest, Pork, a few reasons why immigration is causing crime. I'll respond to each point here.
"People that come from all around the world take with them their way of life. It's not like they leave their way of living behind when they come here. Treatment of women and violence in poor countries is far worse than what we see here."
I absolutely agree people bring their culture with them when they move someplace. I don't know a single historian who would say that isn't true. But I'm somewhat dubious about your next claim about the treatment of women and violence, and I disagree with your implication. Even if you set aside the fact that, for example, rates of gun violence are extremely high in the U.S., you're implying that violence is part of people's culture, which I am skeptical of. It's a common claim that has been made about immigrant groups going all the way back to the late 18th century. The Irish, the Germans, the Italians, Poles, any Catholics, all of these groups were accused of being violent, criminally-minded, alcoholic, woman-beaters. Literally every one of those groups. And it's always been much more of a myth than a reality. And even if and when it's true that crime and violence, including against women, is higher in poor countries, that's sometimes exactly what people are trying to
escape by migrating. This is exactly the case with the spikes in immigration from Central American countries these days.
"People coming from a place where they had nothing only to come here where they still have nothing but everything costs a whole lot more is gonna cause problems.
Come here with nothing and you'll find yourself more poor than where you came from."
This is an interesting theory, but think about the historical implications of that. Basically since before the U.S. was even a country, most people who emigrated here came from a poorer country or were one of the poorer groups in their own country. That was the case from the first indentured English servants through the land-starved peasants of Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Scandinavia, and France, to the working-class Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Ukrainians, and Russians who came a bit later. Almost all immigrants to the U.S. well before the Asian and Latin American immigration of the last 50-60 years were relatively poor in their own country and found themselves relatively poorer in richer America. But they came anyway for various reasons, mainly because in real terms, their economic prospects were better in the U.S. than they would have been at home. They could make more money than they could at home, and even if they were relatively poorer than the more established groups of Americans--that is, they were even worse off relative to those rich Americans compared to where they were in relation to their richer German or Italian counterparts back home--they had the possibility of future economic mobility. That's still why immigrants come today. Is it frustrating for people? Sure. It always has been. Historians of immigration are always trying to remind people that of those waves of European immigrants at the turn of the 20th century,
50% of them eventually moved back home.
You're suggesting that those frustrations, the frustrations poor immigrants feel here, motivate them to turn to crime. I find that a dubious theory without evidence, and even more importantly, if that were true historically, wouldn't that suggest that the vast majority of historical immigrants to America got here and turned to crime? That would be most of our ancestors. Of course, it is true historically that some small segments of some immigrant groups were involved in crime, the Irish and Italian gangs, particularly, but most of the ideas that we have about that are exaggerated and come from anti-immigrant stereotypes. There were also nativist Protestant gangs of "native born" Americans involved in crime, to say nothing of the KKK, which definitely didn't attract a lot of immigrant support! In the aggregate, historians have not found that immigrant groups were disproportionally involved in crime. So if it weren't true in the past, why would it be true today? Where's the evidence that these poor immigrants are leading to crime? The only reason I can speculate you could come up with is where immigrants are coming from. And at that point, you're not basing your claims on economics or poverty but on something cultural that's not related to economics. Again, this is the same argument that anti-immigrant groups have made basically since the U.S. was founded. The Know-Nothings and others always pointed to their culture, and often spoke of the Irish "race" or the Italian "race" or the Jewish or even Catholic "race" as a problem--as you can see, the definition of race has definitely changed over the years. But it was wrong when it was about the Irish and the Germans and the Italians, and I think the evidence suggests it's wrong today about Hondurans, or Somalians, or fill-in-the-blank.
None of this is to say that crime isn't an issue that needs to be addressed. It clearly should be. We agree on that. But I don't think immigration is the problem.
