This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 8th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

New data from Texas tells us again that immigrants both legal and

illegal are generally less likely to be arrested and convicted for crimes.

Alex Narasta is author of a new Cato policy brief criminal immigrants in Texas.

We spoke last week.

When we're trying to find data about immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants,

it's hard to come by because a lot of the time the numbers are based

on estimates.

And so when you find a good data source, it's really important that we know what it has to say.

How did you come across this data on Texas?

So I got an email from somebody who was complaining about immigration and crime and they linked me to a

graph on the Texas Department of Public Safety's website that showed the

number of people convicted, illegal immigrants convicted of homicides over a period of time and it had a number of arrests.

And that looked, it looked pretty scary.

So I thought, hey, at least they got the data.

I'm going to file a public information act request

in the state of Texas to get the numbers behind that graph.

So I made sort of a pretty broad request.

They got back to me in about a week, and after going back and forth a few times,

we finally narrowed it down so that I discovered that they recorded the numbers of

arrests and convictions by crime by year by immigration status in Texas which I'd never heard of a state doing that before or

keeping track of it.

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