Formerly research fellow @ Open Phil, now freelance. Mostly on Twitter.
Lauren Gilbert
Karma: 711
Immigration and Crime In The United States
They say: “We found no impact on the overall likelihood of Germans to be victimized in a crime”. That is, refugees were not any likelier than Germans to commit crimes against Germans.
I said: “In Germany, refugees were not particularly likely to commit crimes against Germans”. I have accurately reported their results.
Furthermore, in a post I am working on now, I will discuss why such charts—I look at one simply comparing the % of of a given ethnicity in prison to the % in a population—do not tell you all that much:
“We might overestimate the rate of immigrant crime because:
Immigrant and native-born populations differ. Crime is disproportionately committed by young men (under 30 years old). If the immigrant population contains a lot of young men, and the native population skews older, one could end up with immigrants overrepresented in the prison system even if natives and immigrants are equally likely to commit crimes over their lifetime.
Racial or ethnic bias in the justice system could lead to more convictions for immigrants than the native-born, even if they are committing crimes at the same rate.
The crimes immigrants may have committed could be immigration offenses. In the US, 86% of undocumented people charged with a crime are charged not with a violent or property crime, but with being in the country without permission. The native-born cannot commit immigration offenses in their home country, so mechanically, immigrants commit more immigration offenses than the native born.
I’m also fairly certain this isn’t the kind of crime most people worry about when they worry about immigrants and crime.
On the other hand, this graph might underestimate immigrant crime if:
Criminal immigrants are deported and thus don’t appear in the prison statistics.
Immigrants commit crimes against other immigrants. There is data suggesting that immigrants are less likely to report crimes to law enforcement; this might allow criminals who target this population to get away with more.”
From Portes and Stepnick 1985: “The federal government’s refusal to grant either group political asylum deprived them of benefits under the new 1980 Refugee Act. Although subsequent congressional action alleviated this situation, emergency aid was limited and most of it lapsed by 1983. Lacking either jobs or government assistance, many refugees were compelled to rely on private charity or to invent jobs in a burgeoning “informal” economy in Miami.” So technically, they received some aid—I’ll edit accordingly, thanks for the flag—but considerably less than most refugees.
To quote Billy and Packard 2020, “Our results are at least – in part driven by negative selection of Cubans… a segment of this group even held felony records by US standards” Some of these negatively selected migrants were eventually deported in 2017!
That’s their… headline result? “We do not find, however, any evidence for a systematic link between the scale of refugee immigration (and neither the type of refugee accommodation or refugee sex ratios) and the risk of Germans to become victims of a crime in which refugees are suspects” (pg. 3), “refugee inflows do not exert a statistically significant effect on the crime rate” (pg. 21), “we found no impact on the overall likelihood of Germans to be victimized in a crime” (pg. 31), “our results hence do not support the view that Germans were victimized in greater numbers by refugees” (pg. 34).
The Mariel Boatlift
I haven’t seen a lot of evidence on other kinds of peacekeepers, so I don’t know that I can say with confidence how effective they are! I would guess it depends on how much they are seen as a neutral third party.
More the latter—I think it’s hard to influence the UN, especially if you need security council sign off. Really, you have to influence every country on the security council to agree to more peacekeeping, and also come up with more funding somewhere, and UN bureaucracy is famously difficult and impenetrable.
Would I love to redesign UN peacekeeping to focus more on rule of law and less on soldiers? Absolutely. Do I think there’s much possibility to do that? Not really no.
Yes, I thought that was what you meant but wanted to be clear—I very much don’t think that GiveWell should start recommending the UN. ;)
I should note—I don’t think peacekeeping is anywhere near as cost-effective as GiveWell’s top interventions!
My (very quick, rough) BOTEC on peacekeeping in 2022 had it about half as good as GiveDirectly (see the civil conflict shallow and associated BOTEC). Peacekeeping should not be an EA cause area. Getting the UN to focus more on peacekeeping and less on other functions? That might pencil, since it’s leveraged (though I am very uncertain on that).
The Structural Transformation Case For Peacekeeping
Career Advice For College Students (And Other People, I Guess)
Also a longer response: I do think the lack of demand is worrying and could be suggestive that these studies are not showing real world effects. I haven’t spent enough time in rural Kenya to know how hard it is to get glasses, but I am updating based on what you say!
I do think it is easy to underestimate how bad your vision has gotten and not use glasses you need. Personally, I have failed to notice that my prescription has gotten out of date and continued to use old glasses, and then finally get around to getting new ones and I do notice a productivity improvement. Since your brain can somewhat compensate, I think it’s easy to underestimate the returns to a correct Rx.
I am very excited to see your longer comment when it’s done—make sure to sent it to both OP and Erin Crossett at GiveWell as well; it sounds like we will all benefit from it!
Very interested to see it when it’s done! Always happy to update my thoughts based on new evidence.
Reading glasses might be one of the best buys in global health.
Air Conditioning Is A Survival Technology
Europe Should Require Foods Be Fortified With Folate
Why Brain Drain Isn’t Something We Should Worry About
Rarely is the Question Asked: Is Our Children Learning? [The Learning Crisis in LMIC Education]
Open New York is a c(4) (as noted in the writeup above).
This is not an object-level comment, but great to see you on the Forum, JueYan!
I am not sure how to prove to you that people need income in the United States.
As I say below, they say: “We found no impact on the overall likelihood of Germans to be victimized in a crime”. That is, refugees were not any likelier than Germans to commit crimes against Germans. I said: “In Germany, refugees were not particularly likely to commit crimes against Germans”. I have accurately reported their results.
I discuss below why simple descriptive statistics are insufficient to tell you if a group commits more crime than other groups.