SAN DIEGO (AP) — Donald Trump has reached the heights of political insanity by claiming to link immigration to violent crime, but he is hardly the first American politician to promote this unsubstantiated narrative.
Historians go back at least to the 1850s, when German and Irish immigrants were targeted as depraved thieves. The underlying belief that immigrants breed crime persisted into the 20th and 21st centuries.
But no one compares to Trump, who rose to power by making immigration his main issue and portraying foreign-born people as criminals. Yet the evidence does not support the claim that immigrants are responsible for more crime than native-born Americans.
“As with most things involving Trump, he is unique in the volume and boldness of his views, but he is not invoking history either,” said Carl Bon Tempo, an immigration historian and associate professor at the University at Albany. “That is no accident.”
Here’s a look at the issue and the results of studies as Trump prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination for the third time this week in Milwaukee.
FROM THE 19TH TO THE 21ST CENTURY
Historians trace the story back to at least the 1850s, to the populist Know Nothing movement, also known as the American Party. (Members were required to say “I know nothing” when asked about party.) The Knights of Labor reached their greatest influence in the 1880s, when they linked immigrants to crime as part of a workers’ rights agenda.
Fear of crime led to laws against Chinese immigration in the 1880s and in the 1920s, severely restricting immigration of newcomers from outside Western Europe for four decades.
The high-profile Dillingham Commission issued a 41-volume report in 1911 that found the government was not doing enough to keep out criminal immigrants, reflecting the view that other countries were sending America their worst immigrants. The Wickersham Commission, in another highly anticipated government report in 1931, noted that the theory that immigration fueled crime was “almost as old as the colonies founded by Englishmen on the New England coast.”
Albert Johnson, a Republican newspaper editor representing a congressional district in Washington state, drafted a law in 1924 that severely restricted entry from outside Western Europe because of the population’s great fear of immigration. Coleman Livingston Blease, a Democratic governor and U.S. senator from South Carolina who supported the lynching of blacks, pushed for a law in 1929 that made illegal entry a misdemeanor.
Even as politicians raised other objections to immigration, fear of crime was an underlying fear. In the 1990s, Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan spoke of an “illegal invasion” and focused on cultural issues. California Republican Governor Pete Wilson argued that American citizens were being denied social services when he fought for a 1994 referendum that would have banned education and health care for people living in the county illegally. The proposal was approved by voters but largely rejected in court.
Tom Tancredo, a Republican congressman from Colorado, led the fight against illegal immigration in the 2000s and stressed that many people who entered the country illegally were housed in federal prisons. “They’re coming here to kill you, and you, and me, and my grandchildren,” he said at a rally in New Hampshire in 2005.
TRUMP IS “UNIQUE”
And then there’s Trump, who began his 2015 presidential campaign by saying that Mexico “sends people who have a lot of problems, and they bring those problems with them. They bring drugs. They bring crime. They’re rapists. And some, I suppose, are good people.”
Trump raised awareness of MS-13, a criminal gang with roots among Salvadoran immigrants, and of “angel families” whose relatives were killed by people living in the country illegally. “For years, their pain was met with silence; their fate was viewed with indifference,” he told a group of victims’ families at the White House in 2018.
Trump rarely misses an opportunity to link immigrants to crime. At last month’s presidential debate, he claimed without any evidence that “millions” of immigrants had come to the country from prisons, detention centers and mental institutions under Joe Biden’s watch.
The foreign-born population was estimated at 46.2 million, or nearly 14% of the total U.S. population, in 2022, according to the Census Bureau, including about 11 million people living in the country illegally. Barely a month goes by without at least one person living in the country illegally being charged with a spectacular, gruesome crime, such as the murder of a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student in February or the strangling of a 12-year-old Houston girl in June.
Trump and his allies describe violent crimes committed by people living in the country illegally as preventable acts – especially if the perpetrator has previously had contact with the police in the United States.
A March poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that the share of Americans who say there is a high risk that legal immigrants in the U.S. will commit crimes rose to 32% from 19% in 2017.
Studies show no connection between immigration and crime
Peer-reviewed scientific studies have generally found no link between immigration and violent crime, but conclusions vary depending on the data examined.
The idea that immigration breeds crime “continues to falter in the face of the weight of evidence,” according to a review of the scientific literature in last year’s Annual Review of Criminology. “With few exceptions, studies conducted at both the aggregate and individual levels show that high concentrations of immigrants are not associated with increases in crime and delinquency in neighborhoods and cities in the United States.”
Another analysis 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 found an association tended to conclude that immigration leads to less crime, not more.
Texas is the only state that tracks crime by immigration status. A study published by the National Academy of Sciences, based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety from 2012 to 2018, found that people in the country illegally “have substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants on a range of crimes.”
“There is a lot of research on immigration and crime, but far less on illegal immigration and crime,” says Michael Light, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and co-author of the study of Texas data.
