In any event, it must be noted that illegal immigrants aren’t adding anything unique to the labor market—machines or teenagers could replace them, were wages high enough.
A few years ago, one of the farm labor groups put out ads trying to get anglos to work as pickers and did not a get a single person who made it past the first day. The machines that can pick crops aren't on the market *yet* so we need either legal or illegal immigrants to pick the crops. If they aren't legal, they'll be illegal.
You never hear about this, but the cost of living is increased due to illegal immigration.
The article author does not mention that food is artificially cheap throughout the US because it is picked by illegal workers. You never hear about that either.
Nobody wants to admit that without illegal workers, California ag would collapse, because there are not enough legals to keep California ag on its feet, with the result that the big CA farmers are buying land in Mexico and growing their food there. As one of them, who has been expanding operations into Mexico, said on the radio: "your crops are going to be picked by Mexicans. You just have to decide whether you want that Mexican working on an American farm or a Mexican farm." He said he would rather farm in the US, but he does not have enough labor to pick his crops.
Don't get me wrong - I would like to see illegal immigration stopped, but if California ag is going to have the workers it needs, we need a much more rational and open legal immigration policy.
Similar to the problem of illegal pot which could be fixed by allowing legal pot. I say *could* because in California they overtaxed the legal pot to the point that the black market in illegal pot is still thriving last I knew. But in theory, legal pot could and should undercut the illegal market and all the "externalities" that are a consequence of the criminality of pot, rather than of pot itself, would be diminished.
One of the things nobody mentions in the conversation about crime and immigration is that the illegal pot growing on public lands in the US is largely staffed by illegal immigrants. Get rid of the illegal pot growing and you get rid of a substantial amount of illegal immigrant crime (that's a guess - I don't have data for that, but I know that illegals are often staffing the pot farms on public lands).
That said...
Simply put, the statistics show that illegal immigrants dramatically increase crime rates.
He's citing Breitbart to support that. I just can't treat an article seriously that cites Breitbart as a factual source. And by the way, the NYT is not a "source" for this either, but they cite sources when they make assertions. A source is the original research paper done by qualified researchers for a peer-reviewed publication. Journalists worthy of the name go to the original research as in the case of this article for the ... ahem... left wing Cato Institute:
The vast majority of research finds that immigrants do not increase local crime rates and that they are less likely to cause crime and less likely to be incarcerated than their native-born peers.
https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-illegal-immigrantOr another Cato article
The 25,064 homicide arrests he referred to occurred from August 1955 through April 2010 – a 55-year period. During that time, there were about 934,000 homicides in the United States. As a side note, I had to estimate the number of homicides for 1955-1959 by working backward. Assuming that those 25,064 arrested aliens actually were convicted of 25,064 homicides, then criminal aliens would have been responsible for 2.7 percent of all murders during that time period. During the same time, the average non-citizen resident population of the United States was about 4.6 percent per year. According to that simple back of the envelope calculation, non-citizen residents were underrepresented among murderers.
https://www.cato.org/blog/white-houses-misleading-error-ridden-narrative-immigrants-crimeAnother leftwing media outlet, the National Review argues that illegals commit homicide at higher rates than others, but nowhere near 38%
The total population of California was approximately 37 million, and the illegal alien population was approximately 2.5 million. Applying the same analysis as above, this yields an estimated rate of 97.2 illegal aliens imprisoned for homicide and related offenses per 100,000 illegal aliens, and 74.1 citizens and legal residents imprisoned for homicide and related offenses per 100,000 citizens and legal residents.
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/crime-illegal-immigration/That would yield roughly (2.5/37)*(97/74) = 8.9% of murders committed by illegals. I'm not saying that's a good number - that's a tragedy. But that's the *worst* number I could find from anything I would consider remotely a reputable source.
If you go to the center left media, you find even less support for the 38% assertion.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/30/upshot/crime-immigration-myth.htmlhttps://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/two-charts-demolish-the-notion-that-immigrants-here-illegally-commit-more-crime/?utm_term=.e928c89ce001And center center, which does find one study that supports the assertion that illegals commit more crime than legals
https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/is-illegal-immigration-linked-to-more-or-less-crime/And, not sure where Oxford stands politically, but in general they cite research that says immigrants commit less crime than native-borns
http://oxfordre.com/criminology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190264079.001.0001/acrefore-9780190264079-e-93Martinez, Stowell, and Lee (2010) analyzed the relationship between homicide and immigration in San Diego during periods of major increases in the foreign-born population (1980–2000). They wanted to test the “immigrant paradox.” The paradox is that despite social disorganization theory’s prediction that people living in socially disorganized neighborhoods will have higher crime rates, communities with large immigrant populations have lower levels of crime.
So I question that article. I didn't run down all of his "facts" but just happened to hover on that one link and see that he was not linking to research, but to Breitbart articles. At that point, I didn't bother to check the rest of his "sources."
Now, as it turns out, agriculture is actually a small part of the California GDP, so perhaps you could argue that California should close the borders and just have our food grown in Mexico and import it, but there are long-term security implications to a country that cant' grow its own food.
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