This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 3rd, 2024. I'm Caleb Brown.

Immigrants tend to have lower crime rates than Native-born Americans.

That shouldn't be a controversial statement, and data gathered at the border state of Texas

shows year after year, immigrant crime should be relatively less concerning than the crimes

committed by our fellow Native-born Americans.

He knows Alex Narasta provides details of a new paper. Careful listeners of the Kator Daily Podcast will note that Alex you and I talk about once a year.

When the data is updated on a specific group, and I know economists get excited when they have

access to special data. What is the data that we're looking at and why are we looking at this and not something else?

So it is a very special day. This is like Christmas for economists. The data we're looking at is released by the Texas Department of Public Safety. It is actually done by a FOIA request, but what I ask is the criminal convictions in the state of Texas for various crimes by immigration status.

So the data in Texas uniquely among all states

identifies whether somebody is an illegal immigrant, a legal immigrant, or a native-born American,

and the crimes they are convicted of in Texas by year.

All right, so before we get into the details of what this data shows, which you've done now for a few years,

why is Texas the only state that does this?

So that's a great question. I've dug into this recently actually by talking to people at DPS and some legislators in other

states who want to copy what Texas is doing and basically it was just a they just

decided to in 2011. Every state does have access to this data. Whenever

somebody is arrested their biometric information is run against government

databases automatically to see if they have warrants out for

their arrest in other states or other criminal charges pending but it also

checks their immigration status to see if they're an illegal immigrant for

the purposes of immigration enforcement.

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