After the Trump tweet this morning, (“Build a wall and crime will fall”) we received this from a follower:

“Once again the claim is that crime is due to illegal immigrants. News and Guts, please show some statistics, how much crime is actually due to U.S. Citizens, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants.”

Here you go.  There are two major studies that have been most cited of late.  One comes from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that studied Texas in 2015:

From The Washington Post, June, 2018:

“[T]he social-science research on immigration and crime is clear: Undocumented immigrants are considerably less likely to commit crime than native-born citizens, with immigrants legally in the United States even less likely to do so.”

Here it is in a chart from the Cato Institute:

“As a percentage of their respective populations, there were 56 percent fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of native-born Americans in Texas in 2015. The criminal conviction rate for legal immigrants was about 85 percent below the native-born rate.” – Alex Nowrasteh, Cato Institute 

The other study comes from Michael T. Light and Ty Miller, who studied crime in all 50 states from 1990-2014.  What about places with higher percentages of undocumented immigrants? Do those areas have a higher crime rate?  As The Post writes:  “The answer, as the chart above shows, is a resounding no.”  The study was published in the journal Criminology in March, 2018.  Researchers concluded that not only does illegal immigration not increase crime, it may actually contribute to a drop in the overall crime rates.