This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 4th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

The scourge of immigrant crime remains a relative non-problem if you look at incarceration rates

for immigrants versus native borns. Cato's Alex Narasta is co-author of a new paper

Criminal Immigrants in 2017 available today at Cato.org.

It's probably weird for people to think about looking at crime rates

more than a year behind us, but of course that's how data tends to be gathered. It takes a while to sort and come up with some results. So you've looked into with your co-author the rates of immigrant crime in the year 2017. What do we know?

So we took a look at the American Community Survey. It's part of the U.S US Census, they have a portion where they have

information on those who are in prisons in the United States.

So we took a look at the foreign-born people in prison and then we applied a common statistical method

called the residual method to try to identify illegal immigrants among those who are

incarcerated in prison. We found that for the age group 18 to 54,

Native-born Americans had an incarceration rate of 1,471 for every 100,000 natives.

Illegal immigrants had incarceration rate of 756 per 100,000 illegal immigrants

and legal immigrants in the United States had incarceration rate of 364 per

100,000 legal immigrants.

So just to put that in percentage terms, illegal immigrants are 49% less likely to be incarcerated

than Native-born Americans and legal immigrants are 75% less likely to be

incarcerated than Native-born Americans in the year 2017.

So I see you arguing on the Twitter sphere with people about crime rates and crimes that are committed by immigrants versus native boards.

And there's a common refrain among people who argue with you and that is one a general overstatement based

upon what we know about the number of illegal immigrants in the United States

and then your common rejoinder is that well that actually means

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