Beth Bailey has a provocatively titled and incomplete piece at The Federalist about illegal immigration and crime. Bailey laments the lack of data on illegal immigration and crime while linking to some of our research that estimates illegal immigrant incarceration rates and ignoring excellent criminal conviction and arrest data from Texas that show remarkably low rates of criminality. Bailey does make an excellent point: There aren’t enough criminal data on illegal immigrants.
There are many reasons to collect more and better data on immigration in general and illegal immigration specifically. First and foremost, the truth is valuable. Second, many of the claims made by different sides in the immigration debate are empirical. Wise policy decisions require several inputs and one of them is accurate data and information. Not too much data, but enough to answer questions and make informed policy decisions.
Third, there are many conspiracy theories about immigration partly driven by a paucity of information. Some pro-immigration advocates are worried that more data transparency will worsen public perceptions of immigrants and they have been critical of reports that reveal uncomfortable truths, but they have it exactly backwards. More information can help dispel persistent myths because the reality is almost always less bad than conspiracy theorists imagine. These justifications apply to legal immigration as much as they apply to illegal immigration.
Before listing suggestions for data that should be made available or created, many of which come from the mind of Austin Kocher from TRAC (we had a few productive email exchanges about this topic), it’s important to emphasize that data should be transparent no matter which side of the immigration debate it helps. The Trump administration claimed that it was interested in immigration data transparency but only if it served its policy objectives, so the administration released poorly explained reports about immigrant incarceration focused entirely on the federal prison system that added more confusion than clarity. The Biden administration should just release all the data that it has, preferably in microdata form, along with codebooks to explain the variables while letting policy analysts and others crunch the numbers.
Below are suggestions for which data the Biden administration should release or begin to collect to increase data transparency to better inform the public and policy makers. Much of the information requested below can be released in ways that protect personal privacy. Just to repeat, many of these come from Austin Kocher and I don’t want to take credit for all of them.
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