BORDER SECURITY THREAT ASSESSMENT: Do Facts Reveal a Border

by Brian T. Lynch, MSW

The government is shut down as I write. If you happen to read this blog post after today, it will be the longest federal government shutdown in United States' history. The reason for it is a claim by the President that there is a national crisis at the border. The President says we aren't safe and the crisis can't be resolved without five-billion-dollars to build a section of wall. 

IS THERE A CRISIS AT THE BORDER? Or is our President having a temper tantrum as some have suggested?

Let us start to answer that with statistics that President Trump’s own administration presents about border security. 

Per data in Donald Trump's Executive Order 13789, the # of non-citizens federally convicted of terrorists in 15yrs 2mo time = 244 terrorists, (16 per yr.). That's 44% of the total terrorists. The other 295 (55%) are US citizens 1/2 of which (8.5/yr.) were foreign-born. https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1026436/download 

PLEASE NOTE: As of NOW, if you try to VERIFY the URL and link above you will get this message instead of the document:

Continuing with the report: 

In this same 182-month period, 1,716 US aliens, or 113 per year, were removed from the country for being a national security threat. In contrast, there are 1,300,000 domestic violence attacks per year or 11,504 attacks for every alien ejected for being a security risk.

The Executive Order also says there are 25 honor killings each year, but there are also over 1,000 domestic violence deaths of intimate partners per year in the US. Honor killings are 2.5% of that total.

AND THIS is directly from the Executive Order: In the fiscal year 2017, DHS had 2,554 encounters with individuals on the terrorist watchlist traveling to the United States. Of those encounters, 335 were attempting to enter by land, 2,170 by air, and 49 by sea.

That is just 13% of all terrorist watchlist persons traveling by land from either from Canada or the Mexico border.

Since 2010, the last 8 years, there have been 46 terrorist attacks in the US resulting in 106 dead and 527 injured (Boston bombing nearly half the injuries): 20 attacks by Islamic extremists, 16 by rightwing extremists, 5 by 4 by mental illness and 1 by a leftwing extremist. (The author from a list of terrorist attacks on Wikipedia)

Border crossers rape and murder at lower rates than the general population. Or to flip that around, they are more law-abiding than our citizens. Here is a summary of an actual scholarly report:

In the context of crime, victimization, and immigration in the United States, research shows that people are afraid of immigrants because they think immigrants are a threat to their safety and engage in many violent and property crimes. However, quantitative research has consistently shown that being foreign-born is negatively associated with crime overall and is not significantly associated with committing either violent or property crime. If an undocumented immigrant is arrested for a criminal offense, it tends to be for a misdemeanor.

Researchers suggest that undocumented immigrants may be less likely to engage in serious criminal offending behavior because they seek to earn money and not to draw attention to themselves. Additionally, immigrants who have access to social services are less likely to engage in crime than those who live in communities where such access is not available.

In regard to victimization, immigrants are more likely to be victims of crime. Foreign-born victims of crime may not report their victimization because of fears that they will experience negative consequences if they contact the police. Recently, concern about immigration and victimization has turned to refugees who are at risk of harm from traffickers, who warehouse them, threaten them, and physically abuse them with impunity. More research is needed on the relationship among immigration, offending, and victimization. The United States and other nations that focus on border security may be misplacing their efforts during global crises that result in forced migrations. Poverty and war, among other social conditions that would “encourage” a person to leave their homeland in search of a better life, should be addressed by governments when enforcing immigration laws.

http://oxfordre.com/.../97801.../acrefore-9780190264079-e-93

Here are a few data charts that are helpful in identifying whether or not there is a present crisis at the border:






OXFORDRE.COM

Immigration and Crime - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of…

Immigration and Crime - Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Criminology


And here is another study ABSTRACT: 

Research has shown little support for the enduring proposition that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime. Although classical criminological and neoclassical economic theories would predict immigration to increase crime, most empirical research shows quite the opposite. We investigate the immigration-crime relationship among metropolitan areas over a 40-year period from 1970 to 2010. Our goal is to describe the ongoing and changing association between immigration and a broad range of violent and property crimes. Our results indicate that immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period.https://www.tandfonline.com/.../10.../15377938.2016.1261057

TANDFONLINE.COM

A 2018 study published in Criminology analyzed population-level crime rates from all 50 states from 1990 to 2014 and found that the relationship between immigration and crime is "generally negative." "Increases in the undocumented immigrant population within states are associated with significant decreases in the prevalence of violence," study author Michael Light writes.https://psmag.com/.../research-tells-us-that-immigration...

PSMAG.COM

A 2015 study found that, in the same period, the immigration population more than tripled in the United States; from 1990 to 2013, the violent crime rate decreased by 48 percent, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation data. (ibid)

Here is a screenshot of a graph by the Pew Research Center from a FactCheck.org Website

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/illegal-immigration-statistics/

And here below are a few more charts from a U.S. Customs and Border Security Report that were also published by FactCheck.org :

Notice in the above bar graph dating all the way back to 1961 that the total number of border crossings the year 2000 and has significantly declined since.  The total number of border crossings in 2018 (last year) is 76% below the number in 2000.

While the total number of people crossing the U.S. border is down 76% from the year 2000, the number of family detentions is up. 

Notice that the number of unaccompanied children crossing the border peeked in 2014 and dropped the following year. The number rose again in Barack Obama's last year in office then dropped again since President Trump took office. Last year (2018) the rate of unaccompanied minors crossing the border was about 37% lower than in 2014. 

SUMMARY: From every scholarly study and government information source, the most objective rendering of facts do not support the claim that there is an immigration crisis at our border. And in fact, the data show such a low rate of crimes committed by immigrants that the more immigrants a community has, the lower the crime rate. 

As to why our President is claiming a border crisis and shutting down the government to get his wall build? Who besides him really knows why. What the facts show is that there is no border crisis and no need to disrupt the government and the lives of millions of people affected by the shutdown.