This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 29th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Fans of the President's immigration stance routinely assert that the criminal element

among immigrants is a key concern.

In that case, there's good news.

Immigrants are generally far less likely than Native-born Americans to commit crime.

Cato's Alex Narasta discusses the data.

One of the main arguments against liberalizing immigration or even keeping the same level of immigration that we've had for

years is this idea of criminal immigrants, that immigrants are more likely to be criminals than Americans.

Let's figure out what does the data say about that?

The data says the opposite.

The vast amount of research on this topic

comes to basically one or two conclusions. The first is that immigrants are about

the same level of criminality as natives. That's the less likely finding.

The most likely is that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes, to be incarcerated,

or to cause crime rates to increase in areas where they live relative to Native-born Americans.

Okay, so let's try to understand exactly why that is.

One, a great many immigrants who are in the United States are here

illegally. A great many are and they want to stay here and work illegally.

They, of course, prefer to be legal,

but one of the best ways to get identified,

to be arrested, and to be deported from the United States is to actually commit a crime.

...