Following up on our below note, Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a senior editor of City Journal, argues that there is a crime wave caused by immigrants in his recent piece, “No, You’re Not Imagining a Migrant Crime Spree.” This is not accurate and the article overall is not a useful source for those interested in understanding illegal immigrant criminality.

Malanga’s piece leans heavily on rhetoric and individual cases of migrant crime and doesn’t give nearly as much attention to migrant criminal conviction, arrest, or incarceration rates as he should have. He begins his piece by recounting the tragic murder of Laken Riley in Georgia and a political debate that ensued when President Biden mentioned the murder in his 2024 State of the Union address. Malanga then brushed aside the best empirical evidence on illegal immigrant criminality.

Full research available here: https://​www​.cato​.org/​b​l​o​g​/​y​e​s​-​y​o​u​r​e​-​s​t​i​l​l​-​i​m​a​g​i​n​i​n​g​-​m​i​g​r​a​n​t​-​c​r​i​m​e​-​s​p​r​e​e​-​r​e​s​p​o​n​s​e​-​s​t​e​v​e​n​-​m​a​l​a​n​g​a​-​m​i​g​r​a​n​t​-​crime

Alex Nowrasteh is the vice president for economic and social policy studies at The Cato Institute.

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