New data reveals the truth about illegal-immigrant crime

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Activists’ claims that illegal aliens commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans do may appear convincing, but new data from New York state shows that those here illegally commit crimes at a rate more than three times higher than that of legal residents.

And it’s costing us billions.

It’s true that if you lump all immigrants together, relatively few of them are accused and convicted of crimes committed here in the United States.

Legal immigrants commit crimes at very low rates, so combining their crime data with that of illegal immigrants masks the latter’s higher criminal activity.

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As The Post has reported, the department claims that 7,113 of those currently incarcerated in New York state prisons and jails are illegal immigrants.

They’ve been convicted of committing 148 homicides, 717 assaults, 134 burglaries, 106 robberies, 235 dangerous drugs offenses, 152 weapons offenses, and 260 sexual predatory offenses, among other crimes.

What’s more, New York’s failure to honor US Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers has resulted in the release of 6,947 criminal illegal aliens since January.

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The DHS data gives us a handy metric to calculate relative rates of criminality.

Altogether, roughly 50,803 people are incarcerated in New York’s prison and jail systems: about 32,469 in the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and another 18,334 in the state’s city and county jails.

The 7,113 illegal aliens currently incarcerated thus make up 14% of New York’s total inmate population — and this share is likely an underestimate, because the state doesn’t actively identify immigration status.

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New York is estimated to have between 676,000 and 825,000 illegal aliens out of a total state population of 19.99 million — meaning illegal immigrants make up only 3.4% to 4.15% of the state’s population.

That means they are overrepresented in the state’s prisons and jails by at least 3.4 times.

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Last year, the Biden administration admitted that 9% of the 7.4 million “non-detained” illegal immigrants it had tallied — 662,566 people — already had criminal records, even though the vast majority had voluntarily turned themselves in at the border and were the least likely to be criminals.

This figure even excludes the 2 million known “gotaways” who crossed the border without being caught and the unknown millions who evaded detection altogether — and it likely understates criminal histories, since countries like Venezuela often refuse to share background information.

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