The migrant crime wave that wasn't
US President Donald Trump used the migrant playbook to gain re-election to the White House. Picture: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Speaking at the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner last April, Donald Trump praised a fictional cannibal serial killer as a “very important force” in his presidential re-election campaign:
“They used to go crazy when I talked about... when I talk about Hannibal Lecter. The late great Hannibal Lecter. Right? .
"The fake news would say, 'Why does he talk about that? He’s a fictional character.' He’s not. We have many of them that came across the border. He’s actually not. But when the people went to the voting booth, then we understood why he talked about that because they voted for us. They say, 'We don’t want Hannibal Lecter in our country.'"
This was uniquely and grotesquely absurd but it worked for the instinctively-cunning marketeer who is now focused on massive ICE-organised deportations of illegal immigrants - because throughout history people have been swayed by the fear of outsiders coming to take their jobs/women/lives. Trump just added brains to the mix.
Blaming immigration for America’s troubles is as old as America itself. Every generation has had its designated bogeyman: Irish Catholics since the 1840s, Italians in the early 20th century, Mexicans in the late 20th, and now, a rotating cast of Central Americans, South Americans, and anyone else (but usually brown) who can be labelled 'illegal' for political convenience.
Donald Trump knows this playbook well. In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, he made political hay out of the so-called 'migrant caravan' - a group of Central American migrants trekking north through Mexico. Right-wing media, particularly Fox News, tracked the caravan’s progress as though it were an approaching hurricane, with breathless updates and ominous warnings of impending chaos at the United States border. Yet, by the time election day passed, the caravan had fizzled into a handful of asylum applications alongside all right-wing media reporting of it.
Fast-forward to the 2024 presidential election campaign and Trump was back at it. His message this time was that America was in the grip of a “migrant-driven crime wave” brought on by President Joe Biden’s lax border policies. The Republican National Committee even launched a website with the cinematic title Biden Bloodbath, showcasing a grisly collage of anecdotal migrant crime stories. Fox News dutifully amplified the message in the weeks before election day.
And it worked - at least in terms of public perception. A Pew Research Center survey earlier that year found that 57% of Americans believed the large number of migrants entering the country was leading to more crime, while only 39% said it had little impact. A clear majority had accepted the premise: more migrants equals more crime.
However, as Captain Blackadder in the BBC sitcom might say, there’s just one small problem: It was bollocks.
For all the political mileage squeezed out of the idea that immigrants are driving up crime rates, decades of peer-reviewed research show otherwise. Even the Centre for Immigration Studies (CIS) - a research group that stridently advocates for lower levels of immigration - published a 2009 report concluding:
“It would be a mistake to assume that immigrants as a group are more prone to crime than other groups… there is no clear evidence that immigrants commit crimes at higher or lower rates than others.”
That’s right - even an organisation predisposed to scepticism about immigration couldn’t find the smoking gun. Since then, CIS hasn’t published a similar study, preferring instead to promote the odd set of statistics that seem to support its case.
In October 2022, CIS republished a article by Steven A. Camarota, which claimed that Texas Department of Public Safety figures, “when properly understood”, showed that illegal immigrants had higher conviction rates than the general population for serious crimes like homicide and sexual assault. But even Camarota admitted the evidence was limited, since most jurisdictions don’t track immigration status consistently. Texas, in this sense, is an outlier and so hardly justified Camarota’s extrapolation of his findings to cover the entire country.
But even that outlier has been challenged.
Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute has used the very same Texas datasets covering 2013 to 2022 to reach the opposite conclusion: undocumented immigrants have lower conviction and arrest rates than native-born Americans, while legal immigrants have the lowest of all. He also accused CIS of double-counting offenders in their analysis, which skewed their results.
Nowrasteh has likewise dismantled a high-profile Arizona study by John Lott, which concluded that illegal immigrants were more likely to be incarcerated than other state residents. The problem? Lott’s dataset didn’t exclusively contain illegal immigrants - a rather crucial oversight - and his conclusions thus collapsed under scrutiny.
Even taking account of the lack of official tracking statistics, the perception of immigrants as being responsible for the increase in United States crime rates finds few peer-reviewed or academic studies supporting such beliefs.
Instead, extensive research shows no link between immigration and crime. A 2018 meta-analysis by Charis Kubrin and Graham Ousey examined more than 50 studies between 1994 and 2014 and found no significant relationship between immigration and crime rates. Meanwhile, a 2024 working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, drawing on 150 years of United States Census data, found that immigrants have consistently had lower incarceration rates than native-born citizens.
Michael Light’s research, covering all 50 states between 1990 and 2014, found no link between illegal immigration and violent crime. He even checked for any correlation between illegal immigration and drunk-driving deaths - another political talking point - and came up empty.
Given this overwhelming evidence, why does the 'migrant crime wave' narrative keep resurfacing? Partly because fear makes for better headlines than facts. 'Local Man Goes About His Day Peacefully' doesn’t sell papers or win elections.
In politics, perception is reality - and a perception, once planted, can prove as stubborn to remove as Hanibal Lecter’s desire for “liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti”. It also helps that migration and crime are easy to link in the public imagination. A single shocking incident involving an immigrant can dominate news cycles for days, while the thousands of crimes committed by native-born citizens barely merit a mention. Over time, selective storytelling creates the illusion of a trend and becomes a tool for demagogues and extremist populists to rally support, especially in an age where shocking anecdotal stories with graphic images multiply across social media before they can be fact-checked or placed in proper context.
That’s not to say migration is without challenges, but crime isn’t one of them. America’s data, spanning 150 years and dozens of studies, is remarkably consistent: immigrants are at least as law-abiding, and often more so, than the native-born population.
Yet Trump is deploying thousands of new ICE agents to carry out mass deportations. The data still says migrants are no more criminal - and often less so - than the native-born, but fear is a sturdier currency than facts.
Hannibal Lecter was meant as a grotesque joke, but became a campaign mascot. The tragedy is that in the voting booth, the fiction still works because against all evidence to the contrary, enough people believe he’s real and that he has a Latino accent.
