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The path to the crime crisis often articulated by President Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions goes something like this: Although rates of violent crime remain near their lowest points over the past half-century, spikes in gun violence in several cities most notably Chicago are evidence that things are deteriorating. (The Brennan Center for Justice estimated that increased killings in Chicago constituted half of the overall increase in homicides in big cities nationally in 2016.) This crime wave, then, bolsters the administrations efforts on immigration through a simple rhetorical connection.

So much of the problems you look at Chicago and you look at other places, Trump said in February. So many of the problems are caused by gang members, many of whom are not even legally in our country. When his Justice Department warned nine jurisdictions last week that they faced reduced federal funding if they upheld sanctuary city policies, a news releasereiterated that purported link. Many of these jurisdictions are also crumbling under the weight of illegal immigration and violent crime, it read. The number of homicides in Chicago has skyrocketed, rising more than 50 percent from the 2015 levels. Thats the end point of the path: Crime is up and illegal immigration is the cause.

Theres little evidence that this is really the case. Studies indicate that immigrants broadly are more law-abiding than native citizens. Theres no evidence that a big percentage of immigrants in the country commit violent crimes, much less that they constitute most or even many of the violent criminals in the country.Theres no link between a jurisdiction being a sanctuary city and higher crime rates.

We can evaluate the Trump administrations claim more directly, though. The site DNAInfo collects data on each homicide in Chicago, including data on age and race.

Since January, the site has logged 190 killings in the city. About 82 percent of the victims were black. Nine percent were white, and 4 percent were Hispanic.

FBI data show that most killings in the United States are carried out by people in the same racial group as the victim. The reason for this is obvious: Homicides are usually a function of personal relationships, and people generally associate with family members and friends who share their racial identity. When Trump retweeted a set of fake data implying that black Americans were responsible for most homicides, we created this chart.

Why does this matter? Because most of the undocumented immigrants in Chicago are from Latin America implying that theyre heavily Hispanic.

The Chicago Tribune created estimates of the size and composition of the undocumented population in Illinois, determining that about 36 percent of immigrants living in the state illegally lived in Chicago and that 84 percent of all of those immigrants came from Latin America.

(That the second-largest group of immigrants in the country illegally originates from Asia shouldnt be surprising. New research from the Pew Research Center suggests that, even as the number of undocumented immigrants from Mexico fell since 2009, the number from Asia increased by 17 percent.)

The implication, just to spell it out, is that most of the immigrants in Chicago illegally are Hispanic, not black. (While the Census Bureau differentiates between race and ethnicity meaning that one can be both Hispanic and black the DNAInfo figures do not.)

We cant say from these figures that there is no link between immigrants in the country illegally and Chicagos homicide problem. There are a number of ways to argue that there may be a link. Perhaps those crimes without known perpetrators most of them were committed by such immigrants. (A request for information about the immigration status of known suspects from the state attorney of Cook County was not answered by the time this article was published.) Perhaps some of the victims of the killings fell into that category. Most realistically, perhaps many of the killings can be traced to gang activity that ties, directly or indirectly, to criminal groups linked in some way to Latin America. (How such links would overlap with illegal immigration is another question.)

What we can say, though, is that this isnt what wed expect the demographics to look like if Chicagos homicides were tightly intertwined with a population of immigrants who are in the country illegally from Latin America.

This is just one city, but its one that has driven much of Trumps rhetoric on crime. Theres no question that the recent increase in killings in Chicago deserve attention and analysis. But its very fair to question the role that illegal immigration plays in that increase.

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Trump's attempt to link illegal immigration to Chicago's homicide problem is extremely tenuous - Washington Post

Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly announced on Wednesday the official launch of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements office for victims of illegal immigrant crime, and a program to help track the custody status of violent, illegal perpetrators.

ICEs Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement Office (VOICE) was created in response to President Trumps executive order to enhance public safety, which directed the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to support victims of crimes committed by criminal aliens.

All crime is terrible, but these victims are unique and often too ignored, Kelly said on Wednesday. They are casualties of crimes that should never have taken place because the people who victimized them often times should not have been in the country in the first place.

Kelly outlined objectives of VOICE, including a victim-centered approach to support victims and their families, along with promoting awareness of available services to crime victims, such as the new automated service, DHS-Victim Information and Notification Exchange, which was created to help victims track the immigration custody status of those illegal alien perpetrators of crime.

According to DHS, ICE community relations officers will serve as local representatives to share information with victims regarding the enforcement and removal process of illegal aliens. According to DHS, ICE has 27 victim-assistance specialists across the country who possess a high degree of specialized victim-assistance expertise and training.

ICE is employing a measured approach to building the VOICE office meaning that it intends to expand the services VOICE offers in the future, DHS said in a statement on Wednesday. This approach allows the office to provide immediate services to victims, but will also allow the agency to collect metrics and information to determine additional resource needs and how the office can best serve victims and their families moving forward.

Fox News' Matthew Dean contributed to this report.

Brooke Singman is a Reporter for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @brookefoxnews.

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DHS announces office for victims of illegal immigrant crime - Fox News

The number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. fell to its lowestlevel since the end of the Great Recession, a decline punctuated in part by a steady drop in the number of Mexicans without legal status, a new study shows.

An analysis of U.S. census data by Pew Research Center, published Tuesday, found there were 11 million immigrants in the country illegally in 2015 roughly 3 percent fewer than the 11.3 million undocumented people in 2009, when the economic downturn bottomed out.During that same six-year period, the number of Mexicans in the country illegally plunged to 5.6 million from 6.4 million.

The numbers are not going up, and in fact, the numbers for Mexicans have been going down for almost a decade now, Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew, told the Associated Press in an interview. And that is counter to a lot of the rhetoric you hear.

While illegal immigration in the U.S. surged for nearly two decades during the 1990s and 2000s, reaching a high of 12.2 million in 2007, it later fell and has since hovered around 11 million, Pews report shows. And as Mexicans living in the country illegally has dwindled, the number of undocumented immigrants from other parts of the world has grown. Asian immigrants without legal status rose by to 1.5 million in 2015, from from 1.3 million in 2009. Those living in the U.S. illegally from Central America, meanwhile, increased to 1.8 million from 1.6 million during that time, according to the report.

Suchfindings, however, are unlikely to push the Trump administration away from its plans to ramp up immigration enforcement along the U.S. border with Mexico at a cost of tens of billions of dollars. In addition to aggressively deporting illegal immigrants,the new president and his cabinet want to hire 5,000 new Border Patrol agents and construct a barrier along the U.S. southern border.

This is ground zero this is the front lines, and this is where we take our stand, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said of the U.S.-Mexico border last week during a stop in southern California.

But Robert Warren, a demographer and senior visiting fellow with the non-partisan Center for Migration Studies, told Vocativ that fewer than half of all undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. now arrive by crossing a border illegally. A recent study co-authored by Warren found that two-thirds of all people who joined the undocumented population inthe country in 2014 did so by entering with a legal temporary visa.

That has huge implications for the administrations proposed wall, Warren said, adding that an increase in illegal immigration from Mexico over the next few years is unlikely. At some point you have to determine whats actually cost effective.

Philip Wolgin, an immigration expert at the left-leaning Center for American Progress, said that Pews findings served as more evidence for the Trump administrations misguided approach on immigration policy. Ithink this pushes back on the notion that the response we should have right now is to militarize our border and create deportation force, Wolgin told Vocativ. The reality just doesnt bear that out.

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Illegal Immigration Dips To Pre-Obama Levels - Vocativ

As President Trump is discovering, there are a lot of very difficult, complicated issues he has to deal with. Healthcare, Syria, North Korea and the Russians are a few that come to mind. Controlling our borders and stanching the flow of illegal aliens into the United States, it turns out, is not one of them. In fact, in just the first three months of his administration, dealing with mass illegal immigration is proving to be one of the least complicated matters on the president's plate.

For decades, apologists for mass illegal immigration have been telling us that a) illegal immigration isn't really a problem, and b) that it an uncontrollable phenomenon in any event. Attempting to stop mass illegal immigration would be an expensive and futile effort.

It turns out that the so-called experts were wrong. In just the second full month of the Trump presidency, the number of people apprehended attempting to enter the United States illegally plummeted to 17-year lows. Moreover, the "surge" of illegal migration from Central America of unaccompanied minors (UAMs) and families with children suddenly stopped surging. As recently as December (not coincidentally, the last full month of the Obama presidency), more than 7,000 UAMs arrived at our southern border. By March, that number had dwindled to just 1,914. Likewise, the flood of 16,139 people arriving in family units in December was reduced to a trickle just 1,043 people in March a decline of 93 percent.

Even more remarkably, these dramatic declines in the number of people attempting to cross our border transpired before the first dime has been expended on construction of Trump's "big beautiful wall," and before the first of the administration's requested 5,000 new Border Patrol agents was hired, much less trained and deployed to the front lines.

Illegal immigration has always been a manageable problem. Illegal immigrants are rational people who respond rationally to the signals we send. When our policies convey the sense that we are not serious about enforcing our immigration laws (which has largely been the case for decades), they behave accordingly. Just the mere indication on the part of the Trump administration that they intend to enforce our laws has been sufficient to discourage many people from even attempting to come here illegally.

The president has also taken concrete actions to demonstrate that he is serious about deterring illegal immigration. Among other steps, he has ended the catch-and-release policy of the Obama administration, under which people arriving at the border were permitted to enter the country pending a hearing, often years in the future. The Trump administration, while continuing to prioritize the removal of criminal aliens, has made it clear that it will not exempt all other immigration lawbreakers from deportation.

Now it is up to Congress to reinforce these positive results with long overdue legislative reforms. In addition to funding the president's security barrier (which Congress authorized in 2007) and additional enforcement personnel, lawmakers must address the key pull factors of illegal immigration, most notably the availability of jobs to illegal aliens.

More than three decades after Congress outlawed the employment of illegal aliens, it is time to put teeth in that law. E-Verify, which allows employers to instantly check job applicants' information against Social Security and other government databases, must be made a mandatory part of the hiring process. As illegal aliens come to understand that they will no longer be able to use fraudulent or stolen documents to skirt the law, and employers understand that they will be held accountable if they are caught hiring illegal aliens, the lure of a job in this country will be greatly diminished.

Ironically, discouraging economic migrants from entering and remaining in the country illegally would vastly enhance our ability to target criminal aliens for removal. By eliminating the chaos that has long existed at our borders, fiscal and manpower resources can be devoted to identifying, apprehending and removing aliens who cannot be discouraged by diminished prospects of employment or access to public benefits.

The first few months of the Trump administration have shown that decades of mass illegal immigration were not a consequence of forces beyond our control, but rather the predictable result of politically driven policy choices we have been making. The biggest factor in managing illegal immigration is managing the perceptions of those who are weighing the pros and cons of breaking our laws which is actually not that complicated.

Ira Mehlman is the media director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

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Who knew controlling illegal immigration was this un-complicated? - Washington Examiner

The anti-immigrant hysteria that became a mainstay of President Trumps agenda and the hymnal of the GOP rests on the assumption that we are awash with illegal immigrants. Its illegal immigrants who are responsible for a crime wave. (There isnt a wave, but stick with this for a moment.) Its illegal immigrants, they say, who are responsible for the economic suffering in the Rust Belt. (If we just got rid of them, jobs and wages would go up!) Hillary Clinton was going to continue the Obama administrations policy: open borders!

Well, its all fake. There was a dramatic downturn in illegal immigrants under President Barack Obama, who deported record number of people. As many of us argued, the economic recession reversed the flow of immigrants so on net more are now leaving for Mexico than coming from there. Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute observes, President Trump cant take credit for the unprecedented collapse in illegal immigration since 2007 but the Great Recession, growing Mexican economy, and Mexican demographics can.

The Pew Research Center tells us:

There were 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2015, a small but statistically significant decline from the Centers estimate of 11.3 million for 2009, the last year of the Great Recession. The Centers preliminary estimate of the unauthorized immigrant population in 2016 is 11.3 million, which is statistically no different from the 2009 or 2015 estimates and comes from a different data source with a smaller sample size and a larger margin of error. This more recent preliminary data for 2016 are inconclusive as to whether the total unauthorized immigrant population continued to decrease, held steady or increased.

Oops. You mean getting rid of all those illegal immigrants didnt create job openings for unemployed factory workers in the heartland or boost wages or prevent Chicagos crime increase in the past two years? Nope. It seems the anti-immigration crowd will need to find new scapegoats to blame and new ideas for solving our systemic economic problems.

In particular, Trumps obsession with the Mexican border appears to be entirely misplaced:

Mexicans have long been the largest origin group among unauthorized immigrants and the majority for at least a decade but their numbers have been shrinking since peaking at 6.9 million, or 57% of the total, in 2007. In 2014, they numbered 5.8 million (52% of the total). In 2015, according to the Centers new estimate, they declined to 5.6 million, or 51% of the total. And in 2016, according to the Centers preliminary estimate, the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico was the same, but their share fell to 50% of the total, marking the first time since at least 2005 that Mexicans did not account for a majority of the unauthorized immigrant population.

Why, then, do you suppose the Trump team is so fixated on illegal immigrants and the southern border? Well, immigration exclusionists have been ignoring readily available facts for some time. There is no illegal immigrant crime wave. The border is much more secure.

Were hard-pressed to come up with any other explanation than the obvious one: As in France, fear and hatred of immigrants are a convenient excuse for voters and policymakers who cannot grapple with messy truths.Trump has no policy agenda to help the working and middle class, so he sells xenophobia. Get rid of illegals and youll all have $30-per-hour jobs! You cant make a middle-class living as a manual laborer? blame the immigrants! Scared of terrorism and dont want to think about the problem of radicalization of Westerners? Blame the refugees, the most thoroughly vetted immigrants there are.

Its time to put an end to the nonsense, stop turning our cities and communities upside-down, alienating our ally Mexico over an unneeded wall, wasting money on building a wall and vilifying outsiders. Right-wingers should stop pushing the comforting fantasy to displaced workers that nothing they have done (e.g., not gone to college, not developed computer skills, stayed in locales with no jobs) and nothing they have to do (e.g., go back to school, develop new skills, move to where the jobs are) matter so long as all those illegal immigrants are stealing their jobs. That sort of fatalism is wrongheaded and ultimately does a huge disservice to those who need to catch up to the globalized economy. And now we now have plenty of evidence that the immigration scaremongering is fraudulent.

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The jig is up: Hysteria over illegal immigration is baseless - Washington Post (blog)