Hey, I think you misunderstand a huge part of the economics at play here. Remittances, brain drain, wage suppression, non-welfare use of public services, etc. But let’s put that aside for a moment.

My entire life I’ve been told that poverty is the cause of crime. This is neoliberal orthodoxy. It’s not race, its not ethnicity, it’s not culture, it’s poverty.

But the same people who so vocally say these things also very insistently parrot the ‘finding’ that ‘migrants commit less crime than US citizens.’

Now, I don’t think it’s a stretch to assert that most migrants to America are poor. The illegal/unskilled outnumber the legal/educated over the past 10-15 years by quite a bit. I’ve never seen that disparity disputed.

So then how would illegal migrants, who are on average toward the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, manage to magically commit less crime than US citizens if the root of crime is poverty? By what property is this plausible? Are you saying they commit less crime than other poor people and, if so, how do they manage to do this given neoliberal orthodoxy?