NJ editorial: Trump is wrong. Immigrants don't commit more crimes.

Studies confirm what most of us knew already: What this man says is nonsense.

Donald Trump has locked down the paranoid racist vote. He has fired up the talk radio clowns. But his assertion that Mexico is sending us rapists — along with others who bring drugs and crime and all kinds of problems — is something that can be measured. And according to a solidly-argued piece in the Wall Street Journal by Jason L. Riley, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, it's dead wrong.

The fact of the matter is, regardless of legal status, immigrants are less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes or be incarcerated. Riley cites a number of studies that back this up. While the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States more than tripled between 1990 and 2013, both violent crime and property crime rates have plunged.

So while there will always be anecdotes that Trump can point to, such as the terrible shooting of a young woman by a Mexican national in San Francisco, Riley's right: "the alleged killer is no more representative of Mexican immigrants than Dylann Roof is representative of white people."

Given how thoroughly Trump's premise has been disproven, it's alarming that this kind of talk gets him a big bump in the Republican polls. His popularity surged after he made this anti-immigrant diatribe the centerpiece of his campaign announcement, particularly among Tea Party folks, a recent Monmouth University poll found — more than doubling his favorability rating from 20 percent to 56 percent.

http://www.nj.com/opinion/index.ssf/2015/07/trump_is_wrong_immigrants_dont_commit_more_crimes.html

"Studies confirm what most of us knew already: What this man says is nonsense." That does not matter to the far-right, tea party base of the republican party. Neither do the "number of studies that back this up" that immigrants commit less, not more, crimes.