This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 21st, 2017.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How do crime rates differ between Native-born Americans and immigrants both legal and illegal?

Cato's Alex Narasta is co-author of a new paper examining exactly that question.

We spoke on Friday. Our general goal was to try to measure the incarceration rates of immigrants, both legal and illegal separately compared to Native

born Americans to see which group is more crime-prone and we found that

when you take a look at the incarcerated population

which when the ages of 18 and 54 native-born Americans have an incarceration

rate of 1.53%.

Illegal immigrants have an incarceration rate of 0.85.

So a little bit more than half that of natives,

while legal immigrants have an incarceration rate of 0.47%,

about one-third the rate of natives and about half that of illegal immigrants.

However, the illegal immigrant incarceration rate

also includes those who were incarcerated

coming across the border or who committed immigration offenses that say

native-born Americans just can't commit because we're natives.

So when you exclude the immigration offenses, the immigration

crimes that people are incarcerated for, the illegal immigrant

incarceration rate is actually about the same as that for legal immigrants at 0.5%.

So is it surprising that the incarceration rate once you've accounted for immigration

violations is essentially is very close between legal and illegal

...