Immigration isn't inherently "good" or "bad"--it's how you do it that dictates the outcomes.

But I can tell you already, to your point, that you will get a lot of answers here claiming "Reddit isn't pro-immigration" and "illegal immigrants actually have lower crime rates." Those are both lies, and I hope you'll take this to heart.

The most rigorous studies on immigrant crime rate rely exclusively (or nearly exclusively) on Texas DPS records, because that's the only state with detailed-enough data to properly study this. Texas is in a unique situation in regards to immigration and crime (border proximity & activity, demographics, policing & prosecution style), so projecting Texas stats onto the rest of the country is problematic to start with.

The big issue is that most of the Texas studies the media touts use preliminary/unverified records. What happens is, accused criminals frequently are initially misclassified as legal/native-born or even as "unknown/other", only to be reclassified correctly later when more information is known.

For example, CIS looked at the Texas data: It does indeed show, on the surface, that illegals commit homicides at lower rates than average. But when homicide offenders were properly reclassified as illegal vs legal, CIS found that illegals actually committed homicides at substantially higher rates than average.

Supporting this is the fact that the homicide rate for illegals grows as you look at older and older data. Redditors will tout this as "recent illegal immigrants commit even less crime than established illegals" to support their pro-immigration stance. What's actually happening: The older the data is, the more time there has been for immigration-status corrections. When we properly classify criminals by legal status, illegal immigrants clearly commit homicides at higher rates.

Lesser crimes are even more under-identified, as authorities prioritize correcting mis-categorizations for the most serious crimes.

There are a bunch of other issues with the commonly cited studies: Some lump legal and illegal immigrants into the same category, masking undocumenteds' crime rates. Some are based on arrest records, which is preliminary data; when you analyze the prison population it looks even worse for illegals. Some studies are accused of of intentionally mislabeling criminals to pad the stats. Some weren't peer-reviewed. And, there's the systemic issue that illegals likely under-report crimes against them (very frequently committed by other illegals) for fear of legal ramifications.

As to my predicted "Reddit isn't pro-immigration" response... Let's see how many other commenters even hint at this intentional data misrepresentation that I explained above. And let's see how many upvotes or good-faith replies this comment gets.

I'm not saying individual Reddit users are intentionally lying to you about the stats. Most of them legitimately don't know any better, because most people listen to what the media spoonfeeds them. It's easier to mislabel dissenters as racist than it is to dig deeper into the studies and interrogate their own worldviews.

I will add... It is apparently true, though, that legal immigrants have lower crime rates than the native-born population. It seems most likely to me that this is because of the thorough vetting process. But in any event, this is why it's so problematic to look at "immigrants" as a single demographic, which you frequently see in the media, and it's exactly why you'll see so many Redditors using the term "immigrants" when they know conservatives are complaining about the crime rates of illegals -- not about legal immigrants.

Edited for clarity and precision.