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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 9, 2024

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Overall, I don't know if we have enough data to do a proper apples-to-apples comparison.

Well, to make it slightly more apples-to-apples, since the your link provides the incarceration rate, I did a quick search for Clark Country. Funnily enough, like you said, it's not the safest place, and it's actually one of those that drags the national average up. Still, comparing it to your link, it seems roughly on the same level as "all immigrants". If you take South and Central America, it's not even close, sending in more people from that region would increase the incarceration rate even more.

Looking at those charts, I have the feeling they're being misused. It seems they were set up to say something like " America's racist society is turning otherwise law-abiding people into criminals", but through some game of telephone people started retelling it as "immigrants are literally less criminal than average Americans", which is completely wrong.

I don't see how this invalidates the statistic.

What do you mean? He literally said "Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down". How do you parse that data to come to that conclusion? Even if we go with "there's no data for a good apples-to-apples comparison, he's the one that's wrong for making the claim!

Am I missing something here?

Edit: There's something very weird going on in that source. Apparently the average incarceration rate in the US is 531 per 100K, I don't know how you get these numbers to work together with the study you linked. Do they per 100K of the prison population??

Maybe it's because of the age? My link gives the rate for 15-64s, while yours for 18-40's. God, I hate academia.

I took his claim to mean that overall crime rates as measured across the US would be lower than it’d be without immigrants. I’m not even parsing the data, I’m just not seeing how your claim — even if true, which it may well be — invalidates his claim.

I took his claim to mean that the Haitian immigrants coming to Springfield would lower the crime rate in Springfield. My enture point is it uses national rates, and cannot be used when debating local crime, so I don't see how his claim can be valid.

And seriously, how do you read this:

I mean, one should be able to look at the crime rate of Springfield, Ohio over the next few years and see if things shift that much. Of course, history shows that at least w/ the first generation of immigrants, crime is likely to go down.

As "across the US"??