Table of Contents

Race and Crime in America

The Forbidden Topic of Race and Crime

The Pattern of Urban Crime in America

The Racial Subtext of American Electoral Politics

The Hidden Motive for Heavy Immigration?

The Remarkable New York City Exception

The Myth of Hispanic Crime

Hispanic Crime - Growing Media Coverage

Immigration: Facts vs. Ideology

Response to Rubenstein

Hispanic Crime II: The Anti-Immigrationists Strike Back

Them vs. Unzism

Hispanic Crime III: Them vs. Unz

PPIC Data on Hispanic Incarceration (Plus P.S.)

Hispanic Crime IV: Horrors---My Estimates Might Be 10% Off!

Hispanic Crime Estimates

Hispanic Crime: A Guide to the Debate

Hispanic Crime: Social Contract Debate

Hispanic Crime: A Postscript

Race and Crime in America

The unspoken statistical reality of urban crime over the last quarter century.

The Unz Review • July 20, 2013 • 7,300 Words

The Forbidden Topic of Race and Crime

The noted science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once declared that “Reality is what continues to exist whether you believe in it or not.”  Such an observation should be kept in mind when we consider some of the touchier aspects of American society.

Recall the notorious case of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose 1965 report on the terrible deterioration in the condition of the black American family aroused such a firestorm of denunciation and outrage in liberal circles that the topic was rendered totally radioactive for the better part of a generation.  Eventually the continuing deterioration reached such massive proportions that the subject was taken up again by prominent liberals in the 1980s, who then declared Moynihan a prophetic voice, unjustly condemned.

This contentious history of racially-charged social analysis was certainly in the back of my mind when I began my quantitative research into Hispanic crime rates in late 2009.  One traditional difficulty in producing such estimates had been the problematical nature of the data.  Although the FBI Uniform Crime Reports readily show the annual totals of black and Asian criminal perpetrators, Hispanics are generally grouped together with whites and no separate figures are provided, thereby allowing all sorts of extreme speculation by those so inclined.

In order to distinguish reality from vivid imagination, a major section of my analysis focused on the data from America's larger cities, exploring the correlations between their FBI-reported crime rates and their Census-reported ethnic proportions.  If urban crime rates had little relation to the relative size of the local Hispanic population, this would indicate that Hispanics did not have unusually high rates of criminality.  Furthermore, densely populated urban centers have almost always had far more crime than rural areas or suburbs, so restricting the analysis to cities would reduce the impact of that extraneous variable, which might otherwise artificially inflate the national crime statistics for a heavily urbanized population group such as Hispanics.

My expectations proved entirely correct, and the correlations between Hispanic percentages and local crime rates were usually quite close to the same figures for whites, strongly supporting my hypothesis that the two groups had fairly similar rates of urban criminality despite their huge differences in socio-economic status.  But that same simple calculation yielded a remarkably strong correlation between black numbers and crime, fully confirming the implications of the FBI racial data on perpetrators.

This presented me with an obvious quandary. The topic of my article was “Hispanic crime” and my research findings were original and potentially an important addition to the public policy debate.  Yet the black crime figures in my charts and graphs were so striking that I realized they might easily overshadow my other results, becoming the focus of an explosive debate that would inevitably deflect attention away from my central conclusion.  Therefore, I chose to excise the black results, perhaps improperly elevating political prudence over intellectual candor.

I further justified this decision by noting that black crime in America had been an important topic of public discussion for at least the last half-century.  I reasoned that my findings must surely have been quietly known for decades to most social scientists in the relevant fields, and hence would add little to existing knowledge.  However, since that time a few private discussions have led me to seriously question that assumption, as has the emotion-laden but vacuous media firestorm surrounding the George Zimmerman trial.  I have therefore now decided to publish an expanded and unexpurgated version of my analysis, which I believe may have important explanatory value as well as some interesting policy implications.

The Pattern of Urban Crime in America

My central methodology is simple.  I obtained the crime rates and ethnic percentages of America's larger cities from official government data sources and calculated the population-weighted cross-correlations.  In order to minimize the impact of statistical outliers, I applied this same approach to hundreds of different datasets: each of the years 1985 through 2011; homicide rates, robbery rates, and violent crime overall; all large cities of 250,000 and above and also restricted only to major cities of at least 500,000.  I obtained these urban crime correlations with respect to the percentages of local whites, blacks, and Hispanics, but excluded Asians since their numbers were quite insignificant until recently (here and throughout this article, “white” shall refer to non-Hispanic whites).

I also attempted to estimate these same results for the overall immigrant population.  The overwhelming majority of immigrants since 1965 have been Hispanic or Asian while conversely the overwhelming majority of those two population groups have a relatively recent immigrant family background.  So the combined population of Hispanics and Asians constitutes a good proxy for the immigrant community, and allows us to determine the immigrant relationship to crime rates.

Presented graphically, these various urban crime correlations are as follows:

These charts demonstrate that over the last twenty-five years the weighted correlations for each of the crime categories against the percentages of whites, Hispanics, and “immigrants” (i.e. Hispanics-plus-Asians) have fluctuated in the general range of -0.20 to -0.60.  Interestingly enough, for most of the last decade the presence of Hispanics and immigrants has become noticeably less associated with crime than the presence of whites, although that latter category obviously exhibits large regional heterogeneity.  Meanwhile, in the case of blacks, the weighted crime correlations have steadily risen from 0.60 to around 0.80 or above, almost always now falling within between 0.75 and 0.85.

These particular calculations do rely upon several minor methodological choices.  For example, I have used the 2000 Census population thresholds for selecting the sixty-odd large cities in my dataset, while I could have chosen some other year instead.  The substantial annual fluctuations in the urban ethnic percentages provided by the Census-ACS estimates led me to instead use the interpolated Census figures for all years.  The annual urban population totals used by the FBI sometimes differ slightly from the Census numbers, and I used the former for population-weighting purposes.  However, all my results were quite robust with respect to these particular decisions, and modifying them would produce results largely indistinguishable from those presented above.

On a more difficult matter, there is always the possibility of local bias in FBI crime statistics, with the data for some cities possibly being more reliable or comprehensive than for others.  But the reporting rate for homicides is widely accepted as close to 100 percent, and the close correspondence between the results for this “gold standard” crime category and those for the robbery and violent crime rates tends to confirm the validity of the latter.  In any event, we would expect the highest-crime areas to be those most likely to suffer from under-reporting problems, so we would expect our figures to somewhat underestimate the true size of the correlations.

It is important to recognize that within the world of academic sociology discovering an important correlation in the range of 0.80 or above is quite remarkable, almost extraordinary.  And even these correlations between black population prevalence and urban crime rates may actually tend to significantly understate the reality.  All these correlations were performed on a city-wide aggregate basis.  The New York City numbers include both the Upper East Side and Brownsville, Los Angeles both Bel Air and Watts, Chicago the Gold Coast and Englewood, with each city's totals averaging those of both the wealthiest and the most dangerous districts.  This crude methodology tends to obscure the local pattern of crime, which usually varies tremendously between different areas, often roughly corresponding to the lines of racial segregation.  It is hardly a secret that impoverished black areas do have far higher crime rates than affluent white ones.

If instead we relied upon smaller geographical units such as neighborhoods, our results would be much more precise, but ethnicity data is provided by zip code while crime data is reported by precinct, so a major research undertaking would be required to match these dissimilar aggregational units for calculation purposes.  However, the apparent geographical pattern of crime in these cities and most others might lead us to suspect that our national racial correlations would become substantially greater under such a more accurate approach, perhaps often reaching or even exceeding the 0.90 level.  The inescapable conclusion is that local urban crime rates in America seem to be almost entirely explained by the local racial distribution.

But could such a strikingly simple sociological truth possibly be correct?  After all, academic scholars have long advanced a wide variety of different socio-economic explanations for crime, and these have often been heavily promoted by pundits and the media.  Commonly cited factors have been urban density, especially in the case of high-rise housing projects, and local poverty.  There is also the relative number of police officers to consider.  We should certainly compare the possible influence of these factors with the ethnic ones examined above.

Since the geographical borders of a city are generally fixed, average population densities are easy to calculate and in recent years their apparent impact upon crime rates has been negligible, whether for homicide, robbery, or violent crime in general.  For the last dozen years, the density/crime correlations have always ranged between 0.20 and -0.20 and were usually close to zero.  Perhaps many of us have an intuitive mental image of densely populated East Coast cities being natural hotbeds of crime.  But this appears incorrect: crime rates and urban density seem to have little connection.

What about the sizes of the various urban police departments?  Although precise comparisons are sometimes difficult, the Bureau of Justice Statistics periodically publishes official reports on the subject, and the latest 2007 study lists the numerical totals of America's fifty largest urban police forces, allowing us to calculate the weighted correlations between these per capita policing levels and the corresponding crime rates of the years 2007-2011.  We discover that there actually exists a moderately strong positive correlation, generally falling in the range 0.30-0.60: the more police, the more crime.  Although this might seem counterintuitive, the explanation becomes obvious once we reverse the direction of causation.  Higher crime rates usually persuade local authorities to hire additional police officers.

Finally, although urban crime rates do track local economic conditions, the relationship is far from tight.  For the years 2006-2011, the Census-ACS provides estimates of the Mean Income, Median Income, and Poverty Rates for each urban center, and we can easily perform the same calculations we did in the racial case.  The correlations between the Mean Income and Median Income levels and the various crime categories generally fall in the range of -0.40 to -0.60, being moderately rather than strongly negative.  Even the correlation between Poverty Rate and crime—supported by the obvious truism that most street criminals are poor—is hardly enormous, falling between 0.50 and 0.70, and usually well below our racial figures.

The relative strength of these different correlations may be seen by a chart superimposing the economic and ethnic results for the last dozen years of robbery rate correlations for our major cities.  Although the hard economic times since 2008 have considerably increased the influence of the poverty correlate, that factor is still considerably less significant than the racial one.

Indeed, the race/crime correlation so substantially exceeds the poverty/crime relationship that much of the latter may simply be a statistical artifact due to most urban blacks being poor.  Consider that both blacks and Hispanics currently have similar national poverty rates in the one-third range, more than double the white figure, and each constitutes well over 20% of our urban population.  However, major cities with substantial poverty but few blacks usually tend to have far lower levels of crime.  For example, El Paso and Atlanta are comparable in size and have similar poverty rates, but the latter has eight times the robbery rate and over ten times the homicide rate.  Within California, Oakland approximately matches Santa Ana in size and poverty, but has several times the rate of crime.  Thus, it seems plausible that removing the black population from our calculation might actually reduce the residual poverty/crime correlation for non-blacks to a moderate or even a low figure.

To some extent, this surprising possibility is merely a statistical syllogism.  Whenever the correlation to a single factor approaches unity, no other non-equivalent item may have a large, independent impact.  And failing to recognize the existence of such a single, overwhelming factor might lead us to misidentify numerous other spurious influences, whose apparent causal importance actually derives from their own correlations with the primary item.  For many years, the black connection to local crime has been so strong as to almost eliminate the possible role of any other variable.

We must obviously be cautious in interpreting the meaning of these statistical findings since correlation does not necessarily imply causation.  Over the last few years the crime correlation for Hispanic or Hispanic-plus-Asian numbers has been substantially more negative than the same figure for whites, but this does not necessarily prove that whites are much more likely to commit urban crime, though it would tend to rule out the contrary possibility that Hispanics or immigrants have far higher rates of criminality.

However, if we examine the official FBI arrest statistics, we find that these seem to support the most straightforward interpretation of our racial crime correlations.  For example, blacks in America were over six times as likely to be arrested for homicide in 2011 as non-blacks and over eight times as likely to be arrested for robbery; the factors for previous years were usually in a similar range.  The accuracy of this racial pattern of arrests is generally confirmed by the corresponding racial pattern of victim-identification statements, also aggregated by the FBI.  Indeed, several years ago the liberal Sentencing Project organization estimated that some one-third of all American black men are already convicted criminals by their 20s, and the fraction would surely be far higher for those living in urban areas.

A sense of the real world impact of these grim statistics may be found in the stratified 2011 Census-ACS data for major American cities.  The three urban centers with the largest black populations are New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia, and together they contain over one-third more adult black women than black men.  The corresponding national shortfall of black males runs well into the millions, partly accounting for the notorious “marriage gap” problems faced by women of their background.  Those millions of missing black men are generally dead or in prison.

Over the last few years, the official publications of the Bureau of Justice Statistics have made it increasingly difficult to determine the racial totals of inmates in state prisons and local jails but the figures from the mid-2000s probably still provide a reasonable estimate, and I had used these in my 2010 article.  Since crime is overwhelmingly committed by young males, for comparative purposes we should normalize all these incarceration totals against the base population of adult males in their prime-crime years, and the results are summarized in my previously published chart, reprinted here.

Since the mid-1990s, the issue of street crime has mostly dropped off the front pages of our national newspapers and disappeared from the public debate.  Meanwhile, black Americans have gained much greater visibility in the upper reaches of our national elites, while Barack Obama has been elected and reelected as our first black president.  This might seem to indicate that traditional racial cleavages in our society have become less substantial.  Furthermore, with such enormous numbers of young black men now in prison, we might naturally expect that the racial character of American urban crime rates has sharply declined over the last couple of decades.  However, the quantitative evidence demonstrates the exact opposite situation, as may be seen by examining the combined twenty-five year trajectories of our various racial crime correlations, which have steadily grown more extreme.  The images shown on our film screens or television sets may portray one America, but the actual data reveals a very different country.

Once we accept the reality of these stark racial facts, we must naturally wonder about the causes, and also why the historical trends seem to have been moving in exactly the wrong direction over most of the last quarter-century. Certainly many theoretical explanations have been advanced, both from the Left and the Right, and whole library shelves have been filled with books on the subject since the urban violence of the 1960s. A short article is no place for me to summarize such a vast literature on a contentious topic, especially when I can provide no original insights of my own. But good theoretical analysis requires a solid factual grounding, and my main purpose here is to establish those facts, which others may then choose to interpret howsoever they wish.  Absent such information, any national dialogue becomes an exercise in empty ideological posturing.

The Racial Subtext of American Electoral Politics

Racial issues have traditionally been among the most highly charged in American public life, and the nexus of crime and race has been exceptionally contentious for many decades.  Under these circumstances respectable scholars tend to be cautious in discussing or merely investigating this topic, and the mainstream media is usually even more gun-shy.  The striking racial findings presented above require only trivial statistical calculations and may be glimpsed in any casual inspection of the crime rankings of our major cities.  But I remain uncertain to what extent they are already recognized by our experts in social policy.

For example, when I presented my correlation results to one very prominent conservative social scientist, he found them shocking and remarkable, and said he had never imagined that the statistical relationship between race and crime was so extremely strong.  But when I showed the same data to an equally prominent liberal academic, he took the information in stride and said he assumed that almost all experts were already quietly aware of the general facts.  The reactions of other knowledgeable individuals fell all along this spectrum ranging from surprise to familiarity.  Knowledge so explosive that it is usually unspoken and unreported may easily remain unknown even to many of our foremost intellectuals.

But whether or not most of our ruling elites explicitly recognize the stark racial character of American crime, the reality still exists, and we should consider exploring whether these unpublicized facts may have had broader influences in our society, possibly in seemingly unrelated areas.  After all, urban crime has frequently been a leading issue in American public life, during some periods ranking as one of the most important.  Certain matters may not be easily discussed in polite company these days, but if even just a portion of the citizenry is intuitively aware of the situation, their attitudes might have broader ripple effects throughout the entire population.  Is there any substantial evidence for this?

Consider the electoral behavior of American whites, and especially their inclination to support either Democratic or Republican candidates.  Because of gerrymandering, most individual congressional districts are overwhelmingly aligned with one party or another, and general elections are a mere formality; this is often also true of statewide races for senator or governor.  However, in presidential elections both parties almost always field viable national candidates with a reasonable chance of winning, so these provide the best means of gauging white political alignment.  And for these campaigns, the racial lines are clearly established, with the modern Republicans being the “white party,” drawing over 90% of their support from that demographic group, while over 90% of blacks regularly vote the Democratic ticket, which also usually attracts the overwhelming majority of other non-white voters.

As I pointed out in a 2011 article, there has been a striking statewide pattern to white voting behavior over the last couple of decades.  Many conservative activists and media pundits have spent years attacking immigrants, illegal or otherwise, and have regularly denounced the cultural threat posed by the growing population of non-English-speakers or non-white foreigners.  Nevertheless, the empirical fact is that presence or absence of large numbers of Hispanics or Asians in a given state seems to have virtually no impact upon white voting patterns.  Meanwhile, there exists a strong relationship between the size of a state's black population and the likelihood that local whites will favor the Republicans.  The weighted-average correlations between the racial compositions of the fifty states and the degree to which their white voters favor Republican presidential candidates is summarized in the following chart.

GOP leaders are always fearful of being denounced as “racist” by the major media, and often seek to camouflage the underlying source of their electoral support by adopting the most extreme forms of tokenism, promoting black party leaders and spokesmen while heavily recruiting black candidates and focusing almost entirely upon non-racial issues.  Conservative activists often rhetorically identify themselves as heirs to the “party of Lincoln” and may even accuse their Democratic opponents of seeking to keep blacks in Welfare State bondage.  But the actual data tells a very different story about the likely sources of Republican support.

The strength of this pattern may be seen at its extremes.  Mississippi is the state with the highest black percentage and across all six elections its white population was the most likely to vote Republican, with the figures recently running at nearly the 90% level.  Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina are generally clustered together as the next blackest in population, and in most elections their white populations were the next most likely to support the Republican ticket, although being sometimes exceeded by the whites of Alabama, the fifth or sixth blackest state during those decades.

By contrast, consider the three states with the largest non-white percentages: Hawaii, California, and New Mexico.  The whites of the first two have actually been far less likely to vote Republican than whites nationwide, while those in New Mexico fall close to the national average.  This tends to confirm the national statistical results that the widespread presence of non-whites, even in overwhelming numbers, seems to have little impact upon white voting behavior.

While I would not argue that black crime is the sole determining factor behind the racial polarization in white voting behavior, I do suspect it is one of the largest contributors.  Empirically, the presence of blacks causes whites to vote the “law-and-order” Republican ticket, while the presence of Hispanics or Asians seems to have negligible political impact.

Nevertheless, we should remain cautious in interpreting these results.  For example, although these national correlations are certainly substantial, they are almost entirely due to the weighting of the Southern states, in which blacks are almost 20% of the total population and racial tensions have traditionally been the strongest.  In non-Southern states, the correlations are nil, perhaps partly because blacks are found in far smaller numbers, being less than 9% of the total.

The Hidden Motive for Heavy Immigration?

Consider also the highly contentious issue of immigration.  Obviously, much of the underlying conflict is purely economic in character, with workers aware that restricting the supply of available labor will protect their bargaining power over wages, while businesses seek to maximize their profits by expanding the pool of potential employees, whether low-skilled or high-tech.

But all involved participants quickly discover that despite endless protestations to the contrary there is also a clear racial subtext, usually accounting for the emotionality of the debate.  For the last half-century, the overwhelming majority of immigrants, especially illegal ones, have been non-white, and the resulting racial fears have been a central motivating force driving many of the most zealous restrictionists, who fear being swamped by a tidal wave of “the Other.”  However, I believe that racial considerations, whether fully conscious or not, might also be found on the other side of the issue, helping to explain why our national leadership today so uniformly endorses very heavy foreign immigration.

America's ruling financial, media, and political elites are largely concentrated in three major urban centers—New York City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—and all three have contained large black populations, including a violent underclass.  During the early 1990s, many observers feared New York City was headed for urban collapse due to its enormously high crime rates, Los Angeles experienced the massive and deadly Rodney King Riots, and Washington often vied for the title of American homicide capital.  In each city, the violence and crime were overwhelmingly committed by black males, and although white elites were rarely the victims, their fears were quite palpable.

One obvious reaction to these concerns was strong political support for a massive national crackdown on crime, and the prison incarceration of black men increased by almost 500% during the two decades after 1980.  But even after such enormous rates of imprisonment, official FBI statistics indicate that blacks today are still over 600% as likely to commit homicide than non-blacks and their robbery rate is over 700% larger; these disparities seem just as high with respect to Hispanic or Asian immigrants as they are for whites.  Thus, replacing a city's blacks with immigrants would tend to lower local crime rates by as much as 90%, and during the 1990s American elites may have become increasingly aware of this important fact, together with the obvious implications for their quality of urban life and housing values.

According to Census data, between 1990 and 2010 the number of Hispanics and Asians increased by one-third in Los Angeles, by nearly 50% in New York City, and by over 70% in Washington, D.C.  The inevitable result was to squeeze out much of the local black population, which declined, often substantially, in each location.  And all three cities experienced enormous drops in local crime, with homicide rates falling by 73%, 79%, and 72% respectively, perhaps partly as a result of these underlying demographic changes.  Meanwhile, the white population increasingly shifted toward the affluent, who were best able to afford the sharp rise in housing prices.  It is an undeniable fact that American elites, conservative and liberal alike, are today almost universally in favor of very high levels of immigration, and their possible recognition of the direct demographic impact upon their own urban circumstances may be an important but unspoken factor in shaping their views.

As an anecdotal example, consider the case of Matthew Yglesias, a prominent young liberal blogger living in Washington, DC.  A couple of years ago he recounted on his blogsite how he was suddenly attacked from behind and seriously beaten by two young men while walking home one evening from a dinner party.  At first he was quite cagey about identifying his attackers, but he eventually admitted they were blacks, possibly engaged in the growing racial practice of urban “polar bear hunting” so widely publicized by the Drudge Report and other rightwing websites.

Few matters are more likely to trouble the minds of our Harvard-educated intellectual elite than fear of suffering random violent assaults while they walk the streets of their own city.  Yet no respectable progressive would possibly focus on the racial character of such an attack, let alone advocate the removal of local blacks as a precautionary measure.  Instead Yglesias suggested that housing-density issues might have been responsible and that better urban planning would reduce crime.

But consider that support for very high levels of foreign immigration is an impeccably liberal cause, and such policies inevitably displace and remove huge numbers of urban blacks; it is easy to imagine that Yglesias quietly redoubled his pro-immigration zeal in the wake of the incident.  Multiply this personal example a thousand-fold, and perhaps an important strand of the tremendous pro-immigration ideological framework of American elites becomes apparent.  The more conspiratorially-minded racialists, bitterly hostile to immigration, sometimes speculate that there is a diabolical plot by our ruling power structure to “race-replace” America's traditional white population.  Perhaps a hidden motive along these lines does indeed help explain some support for heavy immigration, but I suspect that the race being targeted for replacement is not the white one.

Such factors may also play a role outside the major urban centers discussed above and even where least suspected.  Among all American businessmen, Silicon Valley executives are probably strongest in their pro-immigration advocacy, as indicated by the major political advertising campaign recently launched by top technology CEOs, organized together as “FWD.us.”  Obviously, their own cosmopolitan background and desire for an unlimited supply of inexpensive, high-quality engineers is their primary motive.  However, widespread sentiments in favor of lesser-educated immigrant groups such as undocumented Latin Americans also seem quite strong, and we find Steve Jobs' wealthy widow Laurene Powell Jobs focusing her efforts almost exclusively on that particular aspect of the legislation, with her sentiments hardly being discordant with those of her wealthy peer group.  Could hidden racial factors be part of the explanation?  That might seem quite unlikely since Silicon Valley's black population has been very low for decades, running in the 3 or 4 percent range.

However, a closer examination reveals a very different situation.  The small city of Palo Alto is one of the most desirable local residential areas, home to the late Steve Jobs, as well as the current CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and a host of other companies; by some estimates, it may contain the world's highest per capita concentration of billionaires. On three sides, Palo Alto abuts communities of a similar character: Mountain View, containing Google; the Stanford University campus; and Menlo Park, the center of America's venture capital industry.  But on the fourth side, mostly separated by Highway 101, lies East Palo Alto, which for decades was a dangerous ghetto, overwhelmingly black.

I moved back to Palo Alto from New York City in 1992, and that year East Palo Alto recorded America's highest per capita murder rate; although relatively few of the homicides, robberies, and rapes spilled across the border, enough did to leave many people uneasy.  Gated communities and even street fences are quite uncommon in the region, and for years anyone who wished could go to the home of Steve Jobs and walk around his yard or even peer into his windows.  Meanwhile, the sort of harsh racial profiling widely practiced in some large cities was completely abhorrent to the socially liberal citizenry.  One may easily imagine a scenario in which escalating street crime from the ghetto next door might have produced a collapse in high housing prices and sparked a massive flight of the wealthy.

One reason this did not occur was the vast influx of impoverished immigrants from south of the border that swept into the less affluent communities of the region during those same years and rapidly transformed the local demographics.  Between 1980 and 2010 the combined Hispanic population of Santa Clara and San Mateo counties nearly tripled.  A city offering cheap housing such as East Palo Alto saw far greater relative increases, reversing its demographics during that period from 60% black and 14% Hispanic to 16% black and 65% Hispanic.  Over the last twenty years, the homicide rate in that small city dropped by 85%, with similar huge declines in other crime categories as well, thereby transforming a miserable ghetto into a pleasant working-class community, now featuring new office complexes, luxury hotels, and large regional shopping centers.  Multi-billionaire Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife recently purchased a large $9 million home just a few hundred feet from the East Palo Alto border, a decision that would have been unthinkable during the early 1990s.  Technology executives are highly quantitative individuals, skilled in pattern recognition, and I find it difficult to believe that they have all remained completely oblivious to these local racial factors.

However the powerful role of immigration in transforming the crime rates of important urban centers probably had a much smaller impact on the national totals.  The combined black populations of New York City, Washington, and Los Angeles may have dropped by half a million over the last two decades, but the individuals pushed out did not disappear from the world; they merely moved to Atlanta or Baltimore or Riverside.  But from the personal perspective of America's ruling elite, they did indeed disappear.

For over thirty years, local black activists in Washington, D.C. have accused the ruling white power structure of promoting “The Plan,” a deliberate strategy of removing most of the black population from our national capital and replacing them with whites; and this “conspiracy theory” has been endlessly ridiculed as absurdly paranoid nonsense by our elite Washington media.  Meanwhile, during this same thirty year period, Washington's black population dropped from over 70% to less than half and will probably fall below the white total within the next few years.

Indeed, the strong support of our political elites for Section 8 housing vouchers may be less connected with any alleged social benefits these provide than with their important role in moving large numbers of impoverished urban residents away from the near vicinity of wealthy neighborhoods out into the remote suburbs of the middle class.  Several years ago the Atlantic published a major article by Hanna Rosin on the rapid changes in the geographical pattern of crime induced by these demographic shifts, and the piece provoked much discussion even though the author avoided unduly emphasizing the troubling racial aspects.  Elite selfishness is hardly surprising and a policy of exporting those populations with a strong link to crime into other localities seems a natural strategy, especially if this can be accomplished under the altruistic guise of socially-uplifting anti-poverty programs.

Finally, it is important to emphasize that this clear political interplay between heavy levels of immigration and black urban displacement is a relatively recent development and certainly was not anticipated by the original promoters of the 1965 Immigration Act.  Indeed, although restrictionists routinely denounce that legislation for having flooded America with Hispanic immigrants, the facts are precisely the opposite.  While the 1924 Immigration Act had drastically curtailed immigration from Europe (and Asia), the entire Western Hemisphere was totally exempted, and the U.S. retained its previous “open borders” policy for Mexico and the rest of Latin America until strict quotas were finally introduced as part of the 1965 law.  Although these 1965 changes were expected to enable renewed European immigration, no one anticipated the vast inflow of Hispanic and Asian immigrants in the decades that followed, nor the resulting impact upon the racial composition of our major cities.  But today these continuing urban demographic changes may have now become a significant motive in the minds of the elites advocating increased immigration under the legislation being considered by Congress.

During the 1960s black author James Baldwin coined the widely-quoted phrase “Urban renewal means Negro removal.” I suspect that a somewhat similar semi-intentional national policy is today transforming America's leading urban centers, although it remains almost entirely unreported by our mainstream media.

On rare occasions, the mask slips and the underlying mental workings of our national elites are momentarily revealed. Consider New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, one of our most vocal pro-immigration voices on the national stage and a man whose vast wealth and influence often allow him to be far more candid on controversial topics than most other public figures. In May 2011 Bloomberg was interviewed on Meet the Press, and explained that if he had full authority, he could easily fix the seemingly insoluble problems of a city like Detroit at no cost to the taxpayer. He proposed opening wide the floodgates to unlimited foreign immigration on the condition that all the additional immigrants moved to Detroit and lived there for a decade or so, thereby transforming the city. I suspect this provides an important insight into how he and his friends discuss certain racial issues in private.

The Remarkable New York City Exception

Powerful quantitative evidence for social determinism may be dispiriting, and when the main determinant seems to be race, many Americans will choose to throw up their hands and ignore the statistical facts, simply hoping that these might somehow be proven incorrect.  That is certainly their privilege, but for those individuals who prefer to grit their teeth and mine the data for contrary indications, there do exist a few interesting nuggets.

Weighted average correlations are a very useful summary statistic, but they neither tell the whole story nor do they preclude the existence of outlying cases, which might provide some insights on ameliorating the grim situation we have described.  And it so happens that among our many dozens of major urban centers one of the most extreme race/crime outliers is neither small nor obscure: New York City.  Our largest metropolis often has crime rates that deviate sharply from the usual urban pattern observed almost everywhere else.

Recall our earlier mention of the surprising absence of any correlation between urban population density and crime rates.  Those summary statistics were correct, but they also hid some important variations and the null overall result was almost entirely due to the extremely high density and low crime rates in America's largest city, combined with its huge population-weighting.  If we excluded New York City from our calculations, the remainder of America's major urban centers would demonstrate some moderately strong and fairly stable correlations between density and crime over the last dozen years; for example, density has generally had a positive correlation of around 0.35 with robbery rates.

Similar anomalies appear in the racial crime calculations that have been the central focus of our analysis.  Based on its racial composition, we would expect New York City's homicide rate to be some 70% higher than it actually is, with robbery and violent crime also being far more widespread.  Cities like San Jose and San Diego may have homicide and violent crime rates only half that of New York City, but given the stark differences in their underlying demographics, it is New York City's Finest who deserves praise for their remarkable effectiveness in crime prevention.  Evaluating the apparent success or failure of urban law enforcement policies without candidly considering a city's demographic challenges may lead to incorrect policy judgments.

Little of New York City's success in crime prevention seems due to the relative size of its police force, which is roughly similar to those of Chicago, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston on a per capita basis, and far below that of Washington, D.C., all cities whose crime rates reflect their demographics.  So it appears that New York City's crime-fighting methods rather than merely the number of its officers has been the crucial factor.

Ideas have consequences, as do attempts to avoid them.  For most of the last twenty years, the policing methods implemented under mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg won enormous national praise as they so dramatically cut New York crime rates: murders dropped by over three-quarters.  But during the last few years, some of these same policies have begun receiving widespread criticism among those pundits who may have forgotten just how bad things were two decades ago.

Our simple statistical analysis obviously does not allow us to disentangle the relative importance of the different factors behind New York City's success.  Since the early 1990s, the city implemented a “community policing” model as well as pioneering the rapid use of local crime data to pinpoint dangerous hotspots and allocate resources more accurately.  But other elements of the package have included strict, even harsh policing methods, such as the widespread use of “stop-and-frisk” to reduce gun violence.   Denouncing these techniques as unconstitutional or racially discriminatory may be perfectly justified, but those who do so must consider the trade-offs involved, including the very real possibility of a 70% rise in homicides if local policing effectiveness declined to levels found in the rest of the country.

Let us compare the demographic and crime trends of New York City and Washington, twin abodes of our East Coast urban elite.  Between 1985 and 2011, Washington's homicide rate dropped by 26%, robbery fell 27%, and violent crime in general was cut by 30%; but the city's black population also dropped by 27% during this same period.  Meanwhile, New York City's corresponding declines in crime were far greater, 67%, 78%, and 67% respectively, but were accompanied by only a small 7% decline in black numbers.  For all these serious crime rates to decline at nearly ten times the rate of their primary racial determinant is absolutely remarkable, a combination that left the city an exceptional outlier among America's major urban centers.

Put another way, if America's other cities with large black populations had somehow managed to achieve the same surprisingly low crime rates as New York City then most of the  high racial crime correlations that have been the central findings of this article would disappear.  Conversely, if New York City were excluded from our current national statistics, many of the existing racial crime correlations would exceed 0.90.  These are objective facts and well-intentioned analysts who sharply criticize New York City policing methods should recognize that they may face some unpalatable choices.

Perhaps further research would establish that the widely-lauded elements of local police practice are the ones primarily responsible for such results, and the more controversial methods may safely be eliminated without negative consequences.  But for whatever combination of reasons, the overall results achieved by New York City have been quite remarkable and caution should be exercised before drastic changes are made in such a successful model.

Obviously New York City is not the sole positive outlier on these crime statistics, though it is by far the most significant, both because of its size and the magnitude of its deviation from the predicted results. If we examine the 2011 homicide rates for our set of sixty-six large cities, seventeen of these were at least 30% below the projected trendline, with four cities—Charlotte, Raleigh, St. Paul, and Virginia Beach—achieving even better results than New York City. But many of these successful cities have numerically small black populations, and the total for all seventeen combined is not much larger that of New York City alone. One intriguing fact is that although fewer than one-third of the all our large cities lie in the South, these Southern cities account for over two-thirds of those particularly successful examples, and a roughly similar pattern applies both for other crime rates and for other recent years. The exact mix of cultural, socio-economic, or demographic factors responsible for such notable Southern success in achieving relatively low urban crime rates is unclear, but might warrant further investigation.

Over the last decade or two, liberal intellectuals have regularly denounced their conservative opponents for allowing ideological considerations to trump objective facts, sometimes styling themselves the “Reality-Based Community” as an ironic riposte to the foolish criticism of a top Bush Administration official.  Many of these liberal accusations have considerable merit.  But individuals who claim to accept reality undercut their credibility if they pick and choose which portions of reality they acknowledge and which portions they carefully ignore.  Our academic and media elites should not avoid factual evidence that they dislike.

Consider that over one-quarter of all the urban black males in America have vanished from our society, a loss-ratio approaching that experienced by Europeans during the Black Death of the Middle Ages.  Yet these astonishing statistics have largely remained unreported by our major media and hence unrecognized by the general American public.  Should the medieval scribes of the Fourteenth Century have ignored the annihilating impact of the bubonic plague all around them and merely confined their writings to more pleasant news?

It is said that very young children sometimes believe they can hide themselves by covering their eyes, and that seems to be the general approach taken by our major media to the unpleasantly grim racial crime statistics analyzed in this article.  But the reality continues to exist whether or not we ignore it.

The Myth of Hispanic Crime

Talk TV sensationalists and axe-grinding ideologues have fallen for a myth of immigrant lawlessness.

The American Conservative • January 26, 2010 • 5,500 Words

According to Lou Dobbs, “a third of the prison population in this country is estimated to be illegal aliens,” and Glenn Beck regularly warns of “an illegal alien crime wave.” Congressman Tom Tancredo insists, “The face of illegal immigration on our borders is one of murder, one of drug smuggling, one of vandalism for all the communities along the border, and one of infiltration of people coming into this country for purposes to do us great harm.” Michelle Malkin adds an even more terrifying note, calling our borders “open channels not only for illegal aliens and drug smugglers, but terrorists, too.” Even as far back as 2000, the highly regarded General Social Survey found that 73 percent of Americans believed that immigration caused higher crime rates, a level of concern considerably greater than fears about job losses or social unity.

As Latino gangs have gained notoriety in the United States—particularly MS-13, dubbed the “The World's Most Dangerous Gang” by usually restrained National Geographic—images of violent foreigners have come to dominate much of the national debate on immigration policy. A perception has taken root in the minds of the American public and many elected leaders that the greatest threat posed by mass immigration is crime.

In recent decades, most immigrants have been Hispanic; Asians, who constitute the other large portion of the inflow, are generally regarded as economically successful and law-abiding. Although many Hispanics are American-born, the vast majority still comes from a relatively recent immigrant background. So to a considerable extent, popular concerns about immigrant crime and popular concerns about Hispanic crime amount to the same thing. While fears of perceived racial insensitivity may force many critics to choose their words carefully, widespread belief that Hispanics have high or perhaps very high crime rates seems to exist.

But is this correct? Or are these concerns rooted in the same excitable and ideological mindset that produced endless stories of Saddam's notorious WMD, with activists and their media accomplices passing along rumors and personal beliefs in pursuit of a political agenda rather than bothering to determine the facts? Does America face a Hispanic crime problem or merely a Hispanic crime hoax?

Personal experiences are no substitute for detailed investigation, but they sometimes provide a useful reality check. Since the early 1990s, I've lived in Silicon Valley, a region in which people of white European ancestry are a relatively small minority, separately outnumbered by both Asians and Hispanics, with many of the latter quite poor and often here illegally. On any given day, more than half of the people I encounter in Palo Alto are Hispanics from immigrant backgrounds. Yet my area of the country has exceptionally low crime rates and virtually no serious ethnic conflict. This confounds the expectations of many of my East Coast friends.

Prior to moving back to my native California, I lived for five years in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the most heavily immigrant and ethnically diverse parts of New York City. There as well, white Europeans were a small minority and immigrants from various Latin American countries were the largest ethnic group, close to an absolute majority of the local population. On a typical afternoon or evening, probably 80 percent of the people walking the streets of my neighborhood were non-white, and on dozens of occasions I returned home from Manhattan on a late-night train, the only white face in the subway car. Yet in all my years of living there, I never encountered a hostile or menacing situation, let alone suffered an actual criminal attack. Hardly what one would expect from television images, let alone the wild claims made by conservative magazines or talk radio. The “thousands of brutal assailants and terrorists” City Journal's Heather Mac Donald finds among our immigrant population must have moved into someone else's neighborhood.

So were my personal experiences atypical? Or are the media and conservative movement portrayals so completely wrong? Hispanics will constitute a quarter of the American population within a generation or two according to current demographic projections, so this is an important issue for the future of our country.

The obvious way to answer the question is to consult the public FBI Uniform Crime Report database, which provides aggregated information on the race of all criminal suspects throughout America. Unfortunately, there's a problem: Hispanic criminals are sometimes reported as “white” and sometimes not, rendering the federal crime data almost useless. Therefore, indirect means must be used to estimate the crime rate of Hispanics compared to whites. (Throughout this essay, “white” shall refer to non-Hispanic whites.)

One metric to examine might be relative incarceration rates, since most people who begin a life of criminal activity end up behind bars sooner or later—usually sooner. Furthermore, since so much of prison violence is along racial lines, correctional authorities are careful to record the ethnicity of individual inmates, and the aggregate data is made available annually by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Indeed, over the years, prison-reform groups such as The Sentencing Project, as well as various federal judges, have used this official data to criticize the prison system for its massive overrepresentation of racial minorities among inmates relative to their share of the population.(1)

If we examine the data in the most recent 2008 BJS report, published in December 2009, we discover the total Hispanic incarceration rate, while far below that of blacks, is still almost 150 percent above the white average, having fallen a little from the 170 percent figure in 2000.(2) So perhaps those fearful commentators are right and Hispanics commit crimes at roughly two-and-a-half times the rate of whites in America.

The traditional liberal explanation for this would be that Hispanics are considerably poorer than whites, that poverty and racism cause crime, and that a white-dominated criminal justice system is likely to be biased against suspects of a darker hue. There may or may not be some truth in these common liberal arguments, but since the name of this magazine is The American Conservative, let us put them aside at least for now and consider other possible factors.

The most obvious of these are age and gender. An overwhelming fraction of serious crime is committed by the young, young males in particular. This has been the case throughout recorded history and remains true everywhere in today's world. Almost all American crimes are committed by individuals aged 15-44, with the age range 18-29 representing the sharp peak of criminal activity. Also, the 14-to-1 ratio of males to females in the U.S. prison system provides a sense of just how heavily crime is a male phenomenon; for violent offenses, the ratio is even higher.

And as it happens, the age distribution in America for Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites is quite different. The median age for Hispanics is around 27, near the absolute peak of the prime-crime age range. But the median white age is over 40, putting nearly half the white population above the likely age range for committing crimes. While it is certainly true that Hispanic 23-year-olds have much greater criminal tendencies than white 45-year-olds, a more useful question is the relative criminality of Hispanics and whites of the same age. Also, many Hispanics are immigrants, and since immigrants are more likely to be male, there will be a gender skew in the general Hispanic population. Therefore, let us consider the Hispanic imprisonment rate relative to the number of males in the high-crime age range.

Suddenly the numbers change quite a bit, with the relative Hispanic-to-white total incarceration rate dropping by a third or more for several of the age cohorts. But even these lower figures may still be a bit misleading. As a recent front page New York Times story pointed out, over half of all federal prosecutions these days are for immigration-related offenses, and since a huge fraction of illegal immigrants are from south of the border, the 10 percent or so of U.S. prison inmates who are in federal custody might significantly distort our ethnic imprisonment statistics.(3) Anyway, offenses such as robbery, rape, murder, burglary, assault, and theft are almost always prosecuted in state courts, so it makes sense to separate these street crimes from cases of illegal nannies convicted of illegal nannying.

Another important reason to focus on state-level imprisonment data is the evidence of vast differences among regional criminal-justice systems due to various cultural and political factors. For example, whites in Oklahoma are incarcerated at a rate almost 300 percent higher than whites in New Jersey, and while some of this disparity may result from the greater criminal tendencies of white Oklahomans, it seems likely that the harshness of the local courts and sentencing guidelines may also play an important role. We should therefore try to compare Hispanic incarceration rates with those for whites on a state-by-state basis so as to minimize the impact of differences in local criminal-justice systems.

The most recent BJS publications do not provide state-by-state incarceration data broken down by ethnicity, but the 2005 BJS Bulletin did exactly that, and while relative Hispanic incarceration rates have fallen somewhat in the past five years, the drop has not been large. Therefore, we should be able to use the 2005 figures with confidence.(4)

Our first discovery is that even before adjusting for age, the overall Hispanic incarceration rate drops from 150 percent above the white rate down to just 80 percent above, presumably reflecting the exclusion of immigration-related federal offenses. We can now use census data to estimate the number of prime-crime-age young males in the two groups, and since there is some uncertainty in deciding which age range is most appropriate for normalization purposes, we should probably explore the results with several different choices, such as 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44.(5) (Many observers believe that the number of Hispanic illegal immigrants in America is sharply underestimated by the government; if so, this would correspondingly reduce the relative Hispanic imprisonment rate.)

The overall age-adjusted national imprisonment rates are shown in Chart 1. Hispanic incarceration rates are now between 13 and 31 percent above the white average, depending upon which age range we choose for normalization purposes. By contrast, the claims of extremely high relative black incarceration rates widely publicized several years ago by The Sentencing Project remain correct even after these age adjustments.

Next, if we examine the relative age-adjusted Hispanic imprisonment rate for individual states, we find huge variations. In a number of states, the Hispanic rate is below the white rate, sometimes far below. For example, whites in West Virginia, Arkansas, and Louisiana are imprisoned at three to four times the Hispanic rate relative to their share of the crime-age population. To some degree, this reflects the time-lag impact of the recent arrival of large numbers of Hispanics in these locations, since most of the white convicts entered prison years ago, but such low relative rates of Hispanic incarceration are still intriguing. And even in Florida, where Hispanics have been a large fraction of the total population for decades, the white age-adjusted imprisonment rate is still twice as high as the Hispanic rate.

Furthermore, contrary to official bureaucratic categories, Hispanics are hardly a monolithic ethnic group and actually exhibit large variations in their cultural traditions based on country of origin. The very low Hispanic imprisonment rate in Florida may reflect the considerable economic and social success of the Cuban community centered there. Another set of obvious outliers are the states of the Northeast, primarily the New York/New England region, in which relative Hispanic imprisonment rates generally run two to three times higher than the national Hispanic average, as shown in Chart 2. These exceptionally high Hispanic incarceration rates probably reflect the considerable social and economic difficulties long experienced by the large Puerto Rican and Dominican communities that have settled in that region.

The high incarceration rate for these Caribbean Hispanics may partially explain general perceptions of Hispanic crime rates. A large proportion of America's intellectual, media, and political elite lives in the Northeast, in cities like New York and Boston, and if the Hispanics traditionally living in those areas have unusually high rates of criminal activity, there would be a natural if mistaken tendency to assume that this same pattern also applied to Hispanic groups throughout the country.

But outside the Northeast, the vast majority of Hispanics are Meso-American, being either from Mexico or Central America. Chart 3 summarizes the very different relative imprisonment rates for these groups by focusing on the most heavily Hispanic states outside the Northeast.

Moreover, if we consider weighted-average age-adjusted Hispanic imprisonment ratios excluding those outlying cases of the Northeastern states, we discover that the remaining figure moves into close parity with white incarceration rates. (See Chart 4.) Since Hispanics are still considerably poorer than whites, this is a striking result. Also, crime rates are always higher in densely populated urban areas than in suburbs or rural communities, and since Hispanics are three times as likely as whites to live in cities, their relatively low imprisonment rates become even more surprising.

Another important point to emphasize is the wide disparity in white incarceration rates throughout the country, even when adjusted relative to the number of whites in high-crime age ranges. For example, age-adjusted imprisonment rates for whites in large Southern states such as Florida, Texas, and Georgia may be 200 percent or even 300 percent higher than those for whites in large Northeastern or Midwestern states such as New York, New Jersey, or Illinois, as shown in Chart 5. Although it is impossible to disentangle completely how much of this gap may be due to higher criminality and how much due to harsher judicial systems, it seems likely that both play important roles. So even if the age-adjusted Hispanic incarceration rate is somewhat above the white rate—perhaps 15 percent higher on average—it still falls close to the center of the overall white distribution.

The substantial regional or cultural differences in apparent white criminality are easily illustrated when we consider the age-adjusted Hispanic/white incarceration ratios in the two most heavily Hispanic states, California and Texas, which together contain roughly half of all Hispanics living in the United States. If we normalize the incarceration rate to the number of males aged 15-34, California Hispanics are imprisoned at 9 percent above the local white rate, while Texas Hispanics are imprisoned at 14 percent below the local white rate. Since California is one of America's most liberal “pro-minority” states and Texas one of the most staunchly “law-and-order” conservative ones, and the Hispanics in both states are overwhelmingly Mexican, these somewhat unexpected imprisonment ratios probably reflect the relative criminality of the local white populations more than anything else.

Another important question is to what degree Hispanic criminal activity is influenced by immigration status. While there is a widespread popular impression that immigrants, especially illegal immigrants, have a propensity for violent crime, actual studies almost invariably come to the opposite conclusion: for almost every ethnic group, Hispanic or otherwise, immigrant generations have lower rates of criminal behavior than their American-born children. This has resulted in concerned speculation that even if Hispanic crime rates today are relatively low, this situation may be temporary, and once the Hispanic population shifts from being mostly immigrant to mostly native-born, crime rates might skyrocket. A 2006 Migration Policy Institute study estimated that imprisonment rates are some eight times higher for American-born citizens of Mexican ancestry than for their immigrant co-ethnics.(6) If we can expect Mexican-American crime rates to rise 700 percent in the next generation, we should be very alarmed indeed.

But there are good reasons to doubt the plausibility of that horrific scenario. First, contrary to popular belief, the majority of today's Hispanics are already American-born, and this is certainly true of those in the highest-crime age groups. For example, two-thirds of today's Latinos aged 18-24 are American citizens by birth. This figure has risen from less than half 20 years ago, while crime rates have simultaneously plummeted nationwide, with relative Hispanic imprisonment rates also dropping significantly since 2000. If American-born Mexicans and Central Americans had the exceptionally high crime rates suggested in that 2006 study, it is strange that we have seen no evidence of this either in the trends of national crime data or in imprisonment statistics.

The major difficulty with the study's evidence is that while prisons have an easy time gathering ethnicity data, determining the immigration status of convicts is far more difficult, and is generally based on self-reporting. Not surprisingly, most convicted felons are not eager to reveal their lack of citizenship and then face deportation once their sentences are completed, so the numbers must be taken with a grain of salt. In fact, a November 2009 paper by Steven A. Camarota and Jessica M. Vaughan for the Center for Immigration Studies raised serious doubts about the accuracy of these federal immigrant-imprisonment statistics, both based on the doubtful methodology employed and the huge, anomalous swings that occur on an ongoing basis.(7) For example, the official data seems to show a 28 percent decline in the number of incarcerated immigrants between 1990 and 2000, even as the total number of immigrants grew 59 percent, then a sudden 146 percent rise in incarcerated immigrants from 2000 to 2007, a period when immigrant numbers grew only 22 percent. Such changes seem highly implausible and lead to serious doubts that the gap between immigrant Hispanic and American-born Hispanic criminality is anywhere near as great as has been portrayed. Besides, since perhaps two-thirds of today's highest-crime-age Hispanic population is already American-born, there is a strong upper bound on how much crime rates would rise in the future as that fraction gradually rises to three-quarters or more.

Aside from these imprisonment rates, perhaps we can also gain insight into Hispanic criminality from the crime rates themselves. As mentioned before, the federal statistics on the ethnicity of criminals are unreliable, but by matching the geographical distribution of crime with census data on Hispanic population percentages, we can gain strong circumstantial evidence about the relative criminality of Hispanics and whites.

The smaller the geographical unit we use, the more accurate our analysis will be. But while ethnicity rates can be found for individual zip codes, crime is reported by precinct, and matching these entirely different organizational units would be a major research undertaking. At the opposite end of the spectrum, doing calculations based on entire states provides little information since the populations and geographies are so large and often diverse, and important relationships would tend to remain hidden. The best compromise between effort and accuracy is to focus on America's larger cities, for which both crime and ethnicity data are readily available. Furthermore, crime rates are much higher in densely populated urban areas, so by confining our analysis to these, we are eliminating some of the bias that would occur if we compared crime rates in rural areas with those in urban ones. The U.S. has fewer than 80 cities with populations of 250,000 or more, and of these, less than half are major cities with at least half a million inhabitants. Such small data sets are reasonably easy to analyze.

Take five minutes to consider the list of America's urban crime rates provided on Wikipedia, and you will notice an intriguing pattern.(8) Nearly all of the most heavily Latino cities have low or even extremely low crime rates, and virtually none have rates much above the national average. Eighty percent Latino El Paso has the lowest homicide and robbery rates of any major city in the continental United States. This is not what we would expect to find if Hispanics had crime rates far higher than whites. Individual cities may certainly have anomalously low crime rates for a variety of reasons, but the overall trend of crime rates compared to ethnicity seems unmistakable.

But let us explore white and Hispanic crime rates in a more systematic fashion, drawing our data from the FBI Uniform Crime Report.(9) Consider the five whitest cities in America: Colorado Springs, Colorado; Fort Wayne, Indiana; Portland, Oregon; Lexington, Kentucky; and Lincoln, Nebraska. These cities' populations average 76 percent white, 9 percent Hispanic, and 8 percent black. Their crime rates are generally far below the national urban average, with less than half the homicide and robbery rates and a 30 percent lower violent-crime rate. Perhaps we can consider these figures as a reasonable approximation to the general “white urban crime rate.” These crime averages may be partly due to the local black and Hispanic populations, but since these cities are so overwhelmingly white, this estimate for the white crime rates is about as close as we can hope to get.

One difficulty we encounter is that these heavily white cities are extremely small in population, with three of the five barely registering over the 250,000 threshold required even to be included in our urban analysis and the average size being less than half that for most cities in our list. But augmenting this list with larger, less white cities would introduce other inaccuracies, so we have no choice but to use these small-city white-crime figures as a benchmark, although with considerable caution.

Now let us consider the five most Hispanic cities in America: Corpus Christi, Texas; San Antonio, Texas; Miami, Florida; Santa Ana, California; and El Paso, Texas. Together they total over 3 million in population, averaging 68 percent Hispanic, 22 percent white, and 6 percent black. The ethnicities and crime rates of these cities are displayed in Chart 6.

Overall, the crime rates for these most heavily Hispanic cities are generally low, with violent crime 10 percent below the national urban average and the homicide rate 40 percent lower. On the other hand, the crime rates are still well above those of the white cities we considered above. In fact, the white homicide and violent crime rates are almost one-third lower. This provides some evidence for a higher Hispanic crime rate.

But this evidence is not particularly strong. First, the Hispanic cities are much larger than the white ones, with nearly double the average population. Also, Miami is an extreme outlier, with nearly twice as much crime as the other four Hispanic cities, and shifts the average considerably. If we exclude Miami, half the difference between the crime rates of the most Hispanic and the whitest cities disappears.

Even more striking, the average crime rates for the two most Hispanic cities on our list—Santa Ana and El Paso, each 80 percent Hispanic—are actually below our white urban average, and below the very low crime figures for 86 percent white Lincoln, the single whitest city in the nation. So although some heavily Hispanic cities have higher crime rates than some heavily white ones, the pattern seems very mixed.

Furthermore, if we consider the overall list of American cities, it is easy to find a number of those with sizable Hispanic populations—30, 40, 50 percent or more Hispanic—that have crime rates below our white urban average. If Hispanic crime rates were much higher than those for whites, this would seem very unlikely.

Similar evidence emerges if we restrict our analysis to major cities of half a million people or more and compare the average crime rates for the five most heavily Hispanic cities—Albuquerque, Dallas, Los Angeles, San Antonio, and El Paso—to the those of the five whitest—Oklahoma City, Columbus, Indianapolis, Seattle, and Portland. This time, the more Hispanic cities are the ones with the lower crime rates—10 percent below the white cities in homicide and 15 percent lower in violent crime. A particularly remarkable result is that gigantic Los Angeles—50 percent Hispanic and frequently perceived as a dangerous urban hellhole—has violent crime rates close to those of Portland, Oregon, the whitest major city in the nation at 74 percent. The Hispanic cities and their crime rates are displayed in Chart 7.

Here's a final example, much closer to home. Consider two large and comparable American cities—San Jose, California and Seattle, Washington. Both are located on the West Coast, are overwhelmingly suburban and generally affluent, earn their living from the technology industry, are politically liberal, and have small black populations. Seattle is one of the whitest cities in America at 70 percent, with Asians being the largest minority; Hispanics number only 5 percent. By contrast, San Jose is over 50 percent larger in size and although mostly white and Asian, is one-third Hispanic, with a large number of impoverished illegal immigrants. Seattle's crime rate is indeed low, but the crime rate in San Jose is actually much lower: one-third lower for homicide or violent crime in general and with less than half the robbery rate. In fact, none of the most heavily white major cities in America have crime rates anywhere near as low as one-third Hispanic San Jose.

These individual city comparisons may be quantitatively extended to urban crime rates in general by calculating the weighted-average correlation coefficient between the Hispanic percentage of a city and its various crime rates and performing the same calculation for the white-plus-Asian percentage as well. (Asians are a very small population in most cities, so it is convenient to combine them with whites; since all studies show Asians tend to have much lower crime rates than whites, this will tend to reduce the apparent white crime rate.) Whereas all the previous urban crime figures quoted were from 2008, the latest year available, we can obtain the separate correlations for the last several years in order to consider trends over time.

As Charts 8-13 indicate, the Hispanic and white-plus-Asian crime correlation rates are usually quite close and in many cases have converged to almost identical values, at least since 2005. Moreover, we must remember that all these ethnic percentage rates refer to the total population rather than the percentage of young males in the high-crime years for each group, and as mentioned earlier, the age distributions for Hispanics and whites are very different. In fact, if we repeat these same correlation calculations for the population of males aged 18-29, the Hispanic and white rates substantially diverge, with young Hispanics usually being associated with significantly lower urban crime rates.

A reasonable question arises: are all of these crime rates actual, or might they be statistical artifacts produced by widespread underreporting of crime in heavily Hispanic areas? We cannot absolutely eliminate this possibility, but for homicides the reporting rate is always close to 100 percent, and since for all these cities the homicide and other serious crime rates tend to follow very similar patterns, there is no evidence that any of these racial patterns were warped by substantial underreporting.

Finally, let us consider the historical crime trends in my native Los Angeles, America's second-largest city. During the middle of the 20th century, it was by far America's whitest large city—roughly 80 percent white European by ancestry—and was generally regarded as America's middle-class suburban paradise. But as the decades went by, LA increasingly became a byword for violence, crime, and ethnic conflict, with the deadly Watts and Rodney King racial riots filling television screens across the country. These enormously negative social changes coincided exactly with the population becoming less white, and although relatively few analysts were willing to suggest a direct causal relationship, I suspect it was noticed by all but the most obtuse observers. As early as 1982, a future LA served as the setting for Ridley Scott's dystopian film “Blade Runner,” in which violence, poverty, and sudden death for a vast non-white immigrant population exist side by side with the sybaritic luxury of a tiny remaining white elite.

Since then, these ethnic demographic trends have continued apace, and Los Angeles today ranks as America's least white European large city. Half of the population is Hispanic, and many of these are impoverished illegal immigrants and their families. Yet all crime rates have been falling steadily over the last two decades, with homicide dropping a further 18 percent just last year. As Chart 14 illustrates, most major crime categories are now back down to where they were in the early 1960s, when the population really did look very much like the actors appearing in “Dragnet” and “Leave It to Beaver.” And indeed, violent crime is now roughly the same as for Portland, Oregon, America's whitest major city.

This Los Angeles example also raises important questions about the official claims that Latino youths have exceptionally high rates of gang membership, 1800 percent higher than for whites. Los Angeles supposedly has among the worst Hispanic gang problems, yet the city's actual crime rates are roughly the same as what they were back in the lily-white days of the early 1960s. So if these local gangs aren't committing much crime, what exactly is the definition of a “gang”?

A cynical observer might draw a connection between the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government distributes each year for gang-prevention programs and the zeal with which local officials uncover the severity of their gang problems. In the case of Los Angeles, public officials have held January press conferences each of the last several years hailing the unprecedented drops in serious crime rates. They often follow these up a few months later with contrary press conferences on the horrific state of local gang violence and the desperate need for increased federal funds to cope with this scourge. If the federal government pays cities to find gang problems, many city officials will surely oblige them.

Admittedly, all of the arguments presented here are somewhat statistical and circumstantial. Correlation does not prove causality, and it might be possible to come up with a complex and detailed set of ad hoc theories and counter-arguments to explain away the vast mass of apparent evidence indicating relatively low Hispanic crime rates. But such an approach places the burden of proof on the wrong side.

The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America's Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.

We must bear in mind that most Hispanics are still of very recent immigrant origins and thus are considerably poorer than the average American. There actually does exist a connection between poverty and crime, even if liberals make such a claim, and since today's Hispanic population has roughly the same crime rate as far more affluent whites, there is every reason to expect that this crime rate will drop further as Hispanics continue to move up the economic ladder. As the American Enterprise Institute's Douglas Besharov pointed out in an important but insufficiently noticed October 2007 New York Times column, the last decade or two have seen an extremely rapid economic advance for most of America's Hispanic population.(10) This rise may be connected with the simultaneous and unexpectedly rapid drop in urban crime rates throughout the country.

Meanwhile, the national debate over immigration remains contentious. Restrictionists can provide numerous completely legitimate arguments in favor of their position, ranging from economic competition and cultural conflict to national overpopulation and environmental degradation. But they will discredit these by including unsubstantiated claims about crime. Conservatives have traditionally prided themselves on being realists, dealing with the world as it is rather than attempting to force it to conform to a pre-existing ideological framework. But just as many on the Right succumbed to a fantastical foreign policy that makes the world much more dangerous than it needs to be, some have also accepted the myth that Hispanic immigrants and their children have high crime rates. Such an argument may have considerable emotional appeal, but there is very little hard evidence behind it.

Ron Unz is publisher of The American Conservative. He thanks Razib Khan for his assistance in obtaining the crime and ethnicity data from several public websites and for running the cross correlations of the data.

References

(1) “Uneven Justice: State Rates of Incarceration by Race and Ethnicity,” Marc Mauer and Ryan S. King, July 2007, The Sentencing Project.

(2) “Prisoners in 2008,” William J. Sabol, Heather C. West, and Matthew Cooper, December 2009, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin.

(3) “Immigration Enforcement Fuels Rise in U.S. Cases,” John Schwartz, December 21, 2009, New York Times.

(4) “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2005,” Paige M. Harrison and Allen J. Beck, May 2006, Bureau of Justice Statistics Bulletin.

(5) American Ethnicity calculations are derived from the data provided by the Census Bureau, based on the 2000 Census for that year or the interim American Community Surveys for 2005-2008, available at http://factfinder.census.gov.

(6) “Debunking the Myth of Immigrant Criminality: Imprisonment Among First- and Second-Generation Young Men,” Ruben G. Rumbaut, Roberto G. Gonzales, Golnaz Komaie, and Charlie V. Morgan, June 1, 2006, Migration Policy Institute.

(7) “Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue,” Steven A. Camarota and Jessica M. Vaughan, November 2009, Center for Immigration Studies.

(8) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States _cities_by_crime_rate, January 5, 2010, Wikipedia.

(9) Urban crime rates are derived from the data provided by the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, available at http://fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm.

(10) “The Rio Grande Rises,” Douglas J. Besharov, October 1, 2007, New York Times.

Hispanic Crime - Growing Media Coverage

The Unz Review • February 21, 2010 • 400 Words

My March article in The American Conservative analyzing Hispanic crime rates has begun to receive increased attention from various journalists and commentators. I include a few of the examples below.

“His-Panic: The Myth of Immigrant Crime”

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, March 2010

- Tyler Cowen, New York Times economist columnist, at Marginal Revolution

“An excellent article, full of good information.”

- Heather Horn, The Atlantic Monthly/Atlantic Wire

“Unz debunks the high Hispanic crime rate myth…the piece requires a full reading.”

- Radley Balko, Reason Magazine/Hit & Run, with 98 comments

“One of the more courageous endeavors I’ve seen from a political magazine in a long time.”

- Top stories of the day, Slate/The Slatest

“Ron Unz takes on, and takes down, one of the far-right’s most cherished doctrines”

- David Freddoso, Washington Examiner/Beltway Confidential

“If there is a problem of too much immigration, it doesn’t appear to be in the realm of violent crime.”

- USA Today, Et Cetera – Smart insights on the news of the day

Much of this coverage seems to have been initially prompted by RSS feeds sent out by Felix Salmon of Reuters and Ezra Klein of The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the article sparked something of a flame war between two prominent columnists at The Nation, although they both actually agreed with the substance of my claims:

- Alexander Cockburn and Katha Pollitt, The Nation

“Probably naívely, I thought it encouraging that a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan should devote its March cover and a substantial number of pages to a persuasive assault on right-wing hysteria about the supposedly astronomic crime rates of Hispanics in America.”

- “The Bogus Crime Wave”

Alexander Cockburn, The Nation

- “Ron Unz, Latinos, Liberals, and Scholarship”

Katha Pollitt, The Nation

- “Exchange: Katha Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn on the Hispanic Crime Rate”

However, the response among paleoconservatives has been more mixed:

- Roger D. McGrath, Chronicles

“Kris Jensen’s moderately successful 1962 recording of ‘Torture’ kept running through my brain.”

- John Derbyshire, National Review/NRO

“…an impressive analysis…Data talks, b-s walks…”

- Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune Columnist

“In Los Angeles, which is half Hispanic…the murder rate has plummeted to levels unseen since the tranquil years of the early 1960s”

Finally, the public reaction among White Nationalists has been uniformly negative:

- Hunter Wallace, Occidental Dissent, 62 comments

“An important corollary is that Jews should be totally excluded from our media and organizations.”

Immigration: Facts vs. Ideology

The American Conservative • February 24, 2010 • 2,100 Words

My thanks to Matthew Roberts and Steve Burton (MR+SB) for publishing a detailed critique in Chronicles of my recent article on Hispanic crime rates. However, since I believe their analysis is largely mistaken, I’m providing a response:

[1] One major point which they and various others have criticized is my effort to exclude federal inmates when estimating Hispanic incarceration rates. Whether or not this should be done depends entirely upon what one is seeking to determine.

For example, since a large portion of federal inmates are held on immigration violations, if we were interested in determining the relative rate at which Hispanics and whites violate immigration laws, these figures would be absolutely crucial. However, I will gladly concede that Hispanics are perhaps 2,000% or even 3,000% more likely to be incarcerated for violating immigration laws than whites in America. In fact, when we consider that there are at least 12 million mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants in our country, and that a good fraction of these individuals have probably committed the felony of possessing false identity documents at one time or another, scrupulous enforcement of our immigration laws would produce an absolutely staggering rate of Hispanic incarceration, with total numbers dwarfing those of Stalin’s Gulag at its height.

On a more serious note, aside from immigration violations, the other major cause of federal imprisonment is drug smuggling across borders. Now regardless of one’s ideological preferences, illegal drug activity is certainly a crime, but including these numbers may also distort our estimates of ethnic crime rates. A clue why is provided if one visits the website of the anti-immigrationist Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and notices their touted claim that one-third of all federal prison inmates are “criminal aliens,” a figure many times higher than the percentage for state and local prisoners. The obvious reason is that there exists a thriving drug-smuggling operation all along our southern border, with low-level Mexican “drug mules” being hired to evade border guards and bring their illicit cargo into the United States on a regular basis. If they succeed, they go back home for another load, but if they’re caught, they end up in federal prison. Now these individuals are obviously Hispanic, but since they actually live Mexico rather than in the U.S., it hardly makes sense to regard them as “American” criminals.

The main focus of my analysis is to attempt to estimate the relative criminality of America’s whites and Hispanics with regard to ordinary day-to-day “street crimes” such as robbery, rape, murder, theft, burglary, fraud, arson, and assault. Such crimes are almost always prosecuted in state courts and almost no federal inmates are currently held on such charges. Therefore, it seems reasonable to exclude federal incarceration rates lest the large numbers of immigration violators and border drug-smugglers generate a statistical artifact distorting the overall ethnic data. I’m not sure that I’ve ever heard of a single case in which an illegal immigrant who committed an ordinary “street crime” was prosecuted in federal court, so I think this approach is quite sensible.

[2] Once we have made the decision to focus our attention on state+local incarceration statistics, we encounter some difficulties in obtaining the data. Most of the BJS figures tend to provide only aggregate federal+state+local imprisonment totals, and the most recent BJS reports often exclude the one-third of American criminals held in local jails, presumably to make the overall national incarceration data “look better.” This forced me to rely upon the numbers in the 2005 BJS Report, which have similarly been widely used by most other analysts, whether Left, Right, or Center, ranging from the Ford-funded Sentencing Project to Jared Taylor to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Now Table 13 of the 2005 Report contains a very nice set of incarceration figures, stratified by age, ethnicity, and gender. However, these include federal inmates, so I instead used Table 14 of the same report, which restricts itself to state+local inmates and stratifies by ethnicity and state, the last category also being of considerable interest to me.

MR+SB have correctly pointed out that there appears to be a slight discrepancy between the aggregate white national incarceration statistics in Table 13 and those in Table 14, and they argue that this is a fatal flaw in the document. However, this difference is not entirely surprising. The text for Table 14 explains that missing data for each state was extrapolated from the data provided. Presumably some different correction method was used for the missing data in producing the Table 13 results, perhaps based on national extrapolations. I wish to emphasize that I am making no strong claims that this official government data is absolutely accurate. However, since it is the only data available to us, I have been forced to rely upon it, along with everyone else interested in the subject. I’d also concede that some of the textual explanations of the data tables are rather opaque, but given that the report was written by professional statisticians employed by the federal government, this is hardly surprising.

MR+SB also correctly note that the same 2005-Table 14 state+local incarceration data stratified by ethnicity and state had been previously provided as Table 16 in the 2001 BJS report, and that the numbers were slightly different. However, since the national imprisonment totals had risen by over 10% during that four year period, I don’t share their surprise and distrust at discovering that the white imprisonment rate had also risen by over 10% during that same time. For obvious reasons, I chose to base my analysis on the more recent 2005 figures.

[3] Since the BJS state+local incarceration data is unfortunately stratified neither by age nor gender, I was forced to develop a methodology to adjust these figures for the age and gender differences of the relevant ethnic populations, and this seems to have confused MR+SB. As I mentioned in my article, my approach was simply to divide the total number of inmates by the total high-crime-age male population for each ethnic group to produce an age-adjusted incarceration rate; given methodological uncertainties, I repeated the calculation for 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44 male age cohorts and displayed the differing results. Since the median age of white criminals and white inmates is considerably different than the median age of the white population in general, this adjustment is greatest for white incarceration rates, which was a central point of my entire article. Since I don’t claim that my methodological approach to age-normalization is perfect, I’d welcome MR+SB to suggest and implement a superior approach.

[4] Given these huge methodological uncertainties, all the MR+SB arguments about 10% here or there discussed in [2] above are largely irrelevant. Furthermore, as I emphasized in my article, there are actually vast differences in incarceration rates between the white populations of different states. For example, whether or not we apply age-adjustments whites in Texas are 200% or 300% more likely to be imprisoned than whites in Illinois or New York. So even if my national Hispanic imprisonment estimates are off by some small amount due to the arguments made by MR+SM, they still fall rather close to the center of the white distribution curve.

Admittedly, it seems quite plausible that the ethnic incarceration data gathered by many states is flawed, especially in those states such as Georgia which have only recently experienced a large influx of Hispanics, and might therefore tend to categorize many of these as “white” in their old black/white record keeping system.

But there are even larger potential factors on the other side. For example, as I noted in my article, Hispanics are almost 200% more likely to live in cities than whites, and since densely-populated urban centers have always had much higher crime rates than rural or suburban areas, adjusting for urbanization would massively shift the relative ethnic incarceration ratio. Also, there is a widespread belief, not least among “immigration skeptics,” that the official estimate of twelve million (mostly Hispanic) illegal immigrants is a severe undercount, and since this population is generally young and male, a much higher figure would also drastically reduce the relative Hispanic imprisonment rate. If anything, I’d guess that my estimate of the relative Hispanic/white incarceration rate is a rather conservative one.

[5] Next, MR+SM raise some doubts about my urban crime comparisons. For example, they argue that some of my Hispanic and white city-crime comparisons may be distorted by the size of the black populations. Although this might have some impact, there’s no obvious way to adjust for each and every urban parameter in individual city comparisons, and anyway the cases they cite are quite unpersuasive.

For example, I noted that Seattle and San Jose are very similar cities in most respects, and that although the former is among the whitest cities in America and the latter is one-third Hispanic, San Jose’s crime rates are actually much lower, with roughly half the rate of robberies or violent crime in general. MR+SM argue that the crucial underlying difference is that Seattle is 8.4% black while San Jose is only 3.5% black. But this doesn’t make any sense. If Hispanics actually had a much higher crime rate than whites, then a 4.9 point difference in the black population couldn’t possibly swamp the impact of a 30 point difference in the Hispanic population. They have cited an example which completely undercuts their entire case.

Or consider Los Angeles. Today’s crime rates are roughly the same as those in the early 1960s. Since that time, the Hispanic population has grown by 40 points while the black population has dropped by 4 points. This wouldn’t seem possible if Hispanics had high crime rates. And violent crime in Los Angeles today is approximately the same as in Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city, in which the Hispanic population is below 10% and the black population is actually much lower than in LA.

Similarly, El Paso and Santa Ana are each 80% Hispanic, the most heavily Hispanic cities in the country. Yet both of these cities have violent crime rates lower than 86% white Lincoln, Nebraska, the single whitest city in America. Since each of these three cities has black populations of just 3% or lower, I don’t see how MR+SM can be argue that blacks are the crucial factor here.

Anyway, my cross-correlations showed that across all cities, Hispanic percentage and White+Asian percentage are almost indistinguishable in their relation to urban crime rates. This result would be extremely implausible if Hispanics actually had much higher crime rates than whites.

And as I also noted in my article, all my urban crime correlations were based on the total ethnic percentages, rather than being adjusted for high-crime age males. The latter adjustment would actually reduce the Hispanic urban crime rate correlation to significantly below the White+Asian rate.

[6] Finally, there is the question of ideology. MR+SB correctly claim that I generally support immigration combined with ethnic assimilation, and that I have been sharply critical of policies such as bilingual education and affirmative action partly for this reason. They even go so far as to characterize my set of positions as “Unzism,” adopting a term coined in 2000 by Steve Sailer. This leads them to boldly entitle their entire article “Unzism – A Dangerous Doctrine,” and actually devote nearly half the space to denouncing what they regard as this harmful “ideology.”

Although I am certainly gratified to have my name enshrined as the appellation of a rather sensible set of positions, I can hardly claim to be the first American individual to share these views. As near as I can tell, President Ronald Reagan and every other prominent conservative of his era believed in exactly the same thing. And indeed the roots of “Unzism” seem to stretch back much further than that, to an era before I was even born. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that nearly every prominent American political leader during our two centuries of history more or less followed what MR+SB now denounce as “Unzism.” Certainly, this includes Benjamin Franklin, whose well-known fears about the looming threat of German immigration were focused primarily on concerns that the German immigrants were not learning English nor assimilating into mainstream American society. I would obviously be quite pleased if our high-school history textbooks began identifying Benjamin Franklin as an early adherent of “Unzism,” but I suspect this is too much to ask. Although I am not a specialist in American history, my impression is that what MR+SB now label “Unzism” is pretty similar to elements of what was often in the past called “Americanism.”

I must admit I find it a bit odd that a publication such as Chronicles would devote so much space to such a blistering attack upon views seemingly shared by nearly all of America’s historical leaders across the last couple of centuries. But I suppose that we live in strange times…

Response to Rubenstein

The American Conservative • February 26, 2010 • 1,300 Words

My thanks to Ed Rubenstein for producing a fine rejoinder (Ron Unz Vanishes Hispanic Criminality … Not!) to my own recent analysis of Hispanic crime rates (His-Panic). Most of the previous rebuttals to my original article seemed either utterly risible (Statsholic) or ideologically shrill and analytically weak (Unzism, a Dangerous Doctrine). Although I certainly disagree with the slant of Rubenstein’s interpretations, he raises some strong and quantitatively interesting issues which provide an important contribution to the ongoing debate. This tends to confirm VDare.com’s reputation as the premier “hardcore” anti-Immigrationist webzine.

First of all, I appreciate his willingness to excerpt numerous paragraphs from my article, some of which he endorses and some of which he disputes; this allows his readers to obtain a sense of my claims without being forced to endlessly click between the two pieces. I’m also glad that he seems to accept many important aspects of my own suggested methodology, including the complete unreliability of nominal ethnic crime statistics, the importance of normalizing crime rates to the high-crime cohort of the relevant ethnic population, and the use of BJS incarceration statistics as among the most reliable, if highly imperfect, indicators of ethnic criminality. He also concedes the need to exclude Federal inmates, since the massive over-representation of Hispanics for immigration-violations and (non-resident) Hispanics in border-smuggling would severely skew the crime statistics.

The most important new point he makes — which I had completely missed in my own analysis of the data — is that between 2000 and 2006 the violent crime rates of whites and Hispanics seemed to sharply diverge.

According to the 2008 BJS report, during that half-decade, the number of whites incarcerated in state prison for violent offenses rose by just 7% while the number of Hispanics increased by a whopping 62%. Since violent crime is both the most damaging to society and also the most likely to be reported, this is a telling point. I had primarily focused upon the total number of non-federal inmates, and that data, which did not separate out violent from non-violent offenders, had shown no strong trend.

However, there are several strong caveats to Rubenstein’s finding. First, the data cited excludes the one-third of American inmates held in local jails (which was why I paid little attention to that particular table); however, since state convicts tend to be guilty of the more serious offenses, it seems unlikely that adding the jail inmates would substantially alter the violent offender ratios. We must also be cautious in placing too much weight on the short term trends of just a few years, which may be anomalous for various reasons.

Much more importantly, a central argument of my article had been that ethnic criminality is best inferred not from raw incarceration statistics but from incarceration rates relative to the size of the high-crime age ethnic population; and even just during the few years from 2000-2006, there was actually a substantial change in the relative numbers of Hispanic and white males aged 15-44 (a demographic trend which should come as no great surprise to regular VDare readers!).

Based on the Census/ACS data, the number of white males in that age range dropped by almost 10% during those years, while the corresponding number of Hispanics increased by around 15%. Thus, the age-adjusted increase in violent white inmates was actually between 15 and 20% and for Hispanics was about 40%. Although we still find a significant divergence in white/Hispanic violent criminals, simply adjusting for age cuts the nominal gap in half.

If Hispanics did indeed increase their age-adjusted rate of violent crime relative to whites by over 20% between 2000 and 2006, one explanation might be the ongoing shift of the Hispanic population from (low crime) immigrants to their (higher crime) American-born children. Although the rise in criminality is nothing close to the absurd 700% difference claimed by Rumbaut, all studies have shown that it does seem to exist, and could certainly account for a portion of the 20% increase.

However, since highest-crime age Hispanics are already two-thirds American-born, most of this increase has already occurred, and we would not expect relative violent crime rates to increase much more from this particular cause.

There are other, more empirical reasons to doubt that this apparent Hispanic increase in violent criminality continued past 2006. Consider Los Angeles, America’s most heavily Hispanic megalopolis, and a reasonably crude proxy for Mexican-Americans throughout the rest of California and perhaps even the country as a whole. As I pointed out in my article, both homicides and violent crime rates in LA dropped by about one-half between 2000 and 2009, with crime now having reached roughly the levels of Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city.

I’d hardly be surprised if this huge drop in LA crime rates were directly connected with the sharp simultaneous rise in Hispanic imprisonment rates we have been discussing. But with most of the violent Hispanic criminals now safely in prison and current crime rates fairly low, I suspect that future BJS reports will reveal far smaller increases in Hispanic imprisonment.

In fact, it is quite possible that even the apparent 20% or more relative increase in Hispanic violent criminality during 2000-2006 is actually just a statistical artifact. Over the years, VDare columnists have repeatedly argued that the official figure of 12 million (overwhelmingly Hispanic) illegal immigrants is a severe underestimate, and the true figure is vastly higher. Most illegal immigrants are males 15-44, and if these numbers had increased by just 2 million between 2000 and 2006—exactly the years when the housing boom was drawing so many illegal construction workers from Mexico—the BJS imprisonment totals would actually represent no net increase in violent criminality among Hispanics.

But whether or not Hispanic violent crime rates did rise by an amount in the 20-25% range, I must once again emphasize that this figure is completely dwarfed by the 200% or 300% difference in imprisonment rates between (say) white Texans and white New Jerseyans.

Finally, Rubenstein claims, much as did the Chronicles authors, that differences in the size of the local black populations are the primary factor responsible for the similar crime rates between heavily white and heavily Hispanic cities. In effect, he argues that the statistical impact of high-crime Hispanics is being masked by the presence or absence of even higher-crime blacks. Unfortunately, I find this claim completely unpersuasive, and see no evidence for it either in the comparisons of individual cities or in the overall cross-correlations. I suggest that interested readers consult Section [5] of my Chronicles response (Immigration: Facts vs. Ideology), where I refute this argument at some length. Since this rebuttal was released almost simultaneously with the VDare article, I certainly do not fault Rubenstein for failing to consider my arguments.

One additional point. Numerous critics have disputed my original suggestion that much of America’s endlessly-touted “Hispanic gang problem” appears to be a hoax, merely serving as an easy means for local elected officials to solicit media headlines and federal gang-prevention funding. But this morning’s San Jose Mercury News carried a front-page metro story which perfectly illustrates my claim (“Councilwoman proposes more ‘no gang’ zones“).

Nora Campos, a Hispanic city councilwoman who had considered a run for mayor but instead decided to seek an Assembly seat, has proposed a major expansion of anti-gang measures through San Jose in order to reduce “street gang bloodshed” among the “4,000 to 5,000 validated gang members” belonging to “140 gangs.” The local television stations quickly picked up her proposal, and heavily broadcast Campos’s “tough on crime” image over the airwaves.

Naturally, none of the reporters bothered mentioning that one-third Hispanic San Jose already has about the lowest homicide and violent-crime rates of any major city in the continental United States, with levels being close to those of Japan. I’d imagine that many American film-goers similarly believe that Yakuza gang violence has produced an ongoing reign of terror in Toyko and Kyoto…

Hispanic Crime II: The Anti-Immigrationists Strike Back

RonUnz.org • February 28, 2010 • 200 Words

Although the initial media response to my Hispanic crime article was quite favorable, during the last week a couple of the leading anti-Immigrationist publications struck back with lengthy and detailed critiques. I responded to these with specific rebuttals published on the TAC website:

- “Unzism, A Dangerous Doctrine”

Matthew Roberts and Steve Burton, Chronicles, February 22, 2010

- “Immigration: Facts vs. Ideology”

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, February 24, 2010

- “Ron Unz Vanishes Hispanic Criminality …Not!”

Edward S. Rubenstein, VDare.com, February 24, 2010

- “Response to Rubenstein”

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, February 26, 2010

However, the Ron Paul movement, fresh from its remarkable victory in the CPAC presidential straw poll, was quite supportive. Not only did the Ron Paul News website prominently highlight my article and mention it in a twitter feed to their supporters, but LewRockwell.com, a popular website closely associated with Ron Paul, republished large excerpts of the piece, and followed it up with several blog items focusing on the ongoing debate surrounding the piece:

- “His-Panic”

Ron Unz, LewRockwell.com, February 24, 2010

- “Jihad” in Jackson Heights

David Kramer, LewRockwell.com

I have little doubt that mainstream conservatives will cite this as further evidence of Ron Paul’s bizarre beliefs and irrationality, and therefore redouble their efforts to marginalize him politically, or even formally expel him from the Republican Party and the Conservative Movement. The sort of dangerous extremism exemplified by Ron Paul has absolutely no place in current American politics …

Them vs. Unzism

The American Conservative • March 4, 2010 • 2,600 Words

With four long replies to my Hispanic crime article having appeared just in the last 24 hours, I obviously cannot respond to every point raised, but I’ll try to address the key issues.

First, Jason Richwine’s article in AlternativeRight (Model Minority?) raises some perfectly valid points.

He devotes the first half of his article to highlighting the substantial discrepancy between the BJS numbers in Table 2005-13 and those in Table 2005-14 and mentions that he took the commendable step of actually calling the BJS in hopes of clearing up the mystery, though to no avail. He argues that since the two tables seem to disagree, we should probably disregard both of them, and abandon the BJS statistics in general. This is not entirely unreasonable, but as VDare’s Ed Rubenstein has previously noted, the BJS data constitutes almost our only solid national data on ethnic criminality, and has been used by all previous researchers for this reason. If we throw it away, we’re left with virtually nothing at all so we should try to avoid this.

I’ve already pointed out that since the ethnic incarceration data is submitted by each individual state, the state-by-state numbers in Table 2005-14 are probably closest to the primary source data and hence most reliable. Furthermore, the BJS report explains that all missing data in that table was filled by interpolation on an individual state basis, which would seem the best approach. I’d speculate that since Table 2005-13 presented aggregate national numbers, some other, perhaps less reliable method of interpolation was used, probably accounting for the difference.

Now choosing between the conflicting government data tables based on properly deciphering the opaque methodological notes written by federal statisticians should make us very nervous. But fortunately we have a much better means available of independently validating this BJS data.

Taken by itself, California contains 30% of all the Hispanics in America, and since very few of these are from the Caribbean — namely the Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans who tend to be Hispanic outliers — the state can serve as a good proxy for the Mexicans and Central Americans who represent the overwhelming majority of American Hispanics. In 2006, the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), one of California’s premier research organizations, published Who’s in Prison?, a detailed analysis of the California prison population, based upon the specific state inmate and ethnic data. Since the PPIC ethnic results were calculated relative to the adult rather than the total population, this exclusion of children served as a partial age-adjustment.

If you look on p. 5 of the PPIC report, you’ll find ethnic incarceration charts that look remarkably similar to the ones contained in my own article. According to the numerical results provided, adult Hispanics in California are about 40% more likely to be imprisoned than adult whites, and this is generally consistent with the BJS numbers in Table 2005-14 (the BJS numbers were normalized to the total population rather than just adults). This seems to confirm the accuracy of the BJS data which I had used as the basis for my national analysis.

Furthermore, almost 50% of California’s adult whites are over 45 compared to just 20% of adult Hispanics. Since very few individuals over 45 commit crimes, if we adjust for this population difference we get ratios quite close to the age-adjusted California estimates which I had provided in my original article.

We should also remember that California has been America’s most Hispanic large state for decades and also has had a long history of severe racial violence in the prison system; mandatory ethnic segregation has been the standard administrative response, although repeatedly challenged in the courts. Therefore, the ethnic classification of California inmates is probably more accurate than almost anywhere else in the country. So our California ethnic incarceration statistics are probably as solid as any we’re ever likely to see.

The rough agreement between the California PPIC numbers, the California numbers from the national BJS Table 2005-14, and my own age-adjusted California numbers would seem to strengthen the likelihood that all these consistent results are approximately correct.

Richwine’s second major point is less strong. In keeping with some of his previous work, he argues that there has been a very sharp rise in social pathology and criminality among the American-born children of Hispanic immigrants. Although there is certainly an element of truth in this, I already pointed out in my original article that some of the claims frequently made have been wildly exaggerated and unrealistic. Rubenstein has seconded my arguments about the very poor quality of immigration-status imprisonment data.

Richwine correctly notes that a large fraction of Hispanic adults are still of the immigrant generation, but fails to realize this is no longer true for Hispanic adults in their peak crime years, who are mostly American-born these days. Furthermore, the rapid shift of highest-crime-age Hispanics from the immigrant to the American-born generations occurred exactly at the time that Hispanic imprisonment rates and crime rates in heavily Hispanic cities were rapidly declining. This raises serious doubts about whether the crime difference is nearly as large as he is suggesting.

When he argues that the low crime rate in 50% Hispanic Los Angeles is due to immigration status, I think he is missing the local geographical skew. For example, murder rates and violent crime have been enormously higher in Pico Union and the whole South Central region, where Hispanics tend to be immigrants (and also in violent conflict with the local blacks) than on the traditionally Hispanic Eastside, where the adult population is much more likely to be second or third generation. Thus, although Los Angeles crime rates are currently at historic lows, the rates would be much lower still if not for the remaining high crime hotspots in the most heavily immigrant areas. Although I do agree that immigrant Hispanics generally have lower crime rates, I think the difference is small enough to easily be trumped by other local factors.

I have other reasons for being skeptical of Richwine’s generational claims. I’ve personally been arguing this same topic of Hispanic crime rates for over twenty years now, and I remember how at the beginning of the 1990s, I frequently heard exactly the same claim that although immigrant Hispanics were well-behaved, their American-born children would create a massive crime-wave a bit down the road. But twenty years on, those very children are now in their highest-crime years, and meanwhile crime rates have fallen to much lower levels, whether in Silicon Valley, in Los Angeles, or in most of America’s other heavily Hispanic urban centers. Therefore, I would tend to discount this argument until I actually see some hard evidence to the contrary.

Finally, Richwine suggests estimating Hispanic incarceration rates by using Census data and assuming that Hispanics who report living in institutional quarters are imprisoned felons. But as Rubenstein has already pointed out, this category would also include residents of college dorms and military bases, and the numbers actually obtained by this method are frequently so erratic that they seem to make no sense. By contrast, our PPIC ethnic incarceration data for California appears very solid, and perhaps could be used to calibrate the incarceration figures which Richwine is attempting to tease out of the Census data.

I have much less positive things to say about the lengthy response that Steve Burton published on his website (Reply to Unz). Once again, he argues at great length that federal inmates should be included in the incarceration estimate, disputing that the large number of immigration violators or border drug-smugglers might skew the ethnic statistics, and pointing out that a good number of federal inmates have committed “regular” crimes such as robbery or murder. However, anyone who looks at the figures will see that 70% of federal inmates are being held for immigration or drug violations, while just 30% committed regular crimes. These 70,000 federal felons constitute merely 3% of America’s total inmate population of over two million, so excluding them should hardly make a huge difference in our calculations.

Burton is so adamant about including the federal numbers because I had primarily relied on Table 2005-14, which is limited to state+local inmates, and he is firmly convinced that the numbers in that table are simply wrong, although he has never provided any hard evidence to that effect other than pointing out that they seemingly conflict with the Table 2005-13 numbers, which he prefers to use. I’ve already addressed this issue above, pointing out above that the PPIC California numbers are consistent with the BJS numbers I’m using, so perhaps Burton should now seek to explain why the California numbers must also be wrong.

Burton’s next arguments, regarding individual cities, are even weaker.

I’d casually contrasted the crime rates between San Jose and Seattle, arguing that the cities were roughly comparable but noting that although the former has nearly six times the Hispanic population it also has much lower crime rates. Burton devotes several paragraphs to refuting this one example, performing complex crime calculations based on the ethnicity of the two cities, and emphasizes that although I had claimed Seattle was 8.4% black, the correct figure is actually the 11.5% number that he found on Wikipedia. Now this hardly seems like a huge difference to me, but since Burton made so much of it and I dislike having someone uncover an error in my numbers, I went back and checked the official US Census 2000 numbers and the US Census ACS reports, and sure enough my numbers were exactly correct, and the Wikipedia numbers that Burton used in his complex calculations were completely wrong. Given that Wikipedia is unsourced, any Wikipedia number might have come from the practical joke of a drunken teenager, so should be treated with extreme caution rather than blindly accepted. Automatically assuming that a Wikipedia number disproves the figure previously quoted by a quantitative researcher is hardly the mark of a serious analyst.

One fortunate by-product of Burton’s incorrect Wikipedia-derived calculations is that he formulates the explicit hypothesis that Hispanics commit twice as many crimes as whites of the same age. This is a strong claim which can be tested empirically.

The two whitest cities in America are Lexington, Kentucky and Lincoln, Nebraska, which average 81% white. The two most Hispanic cities in America are El Paso, Texas and Santa Ana, California, which average 80% Hispanic. Each of the two Hispanic cities has a crime rates lower than either of the two white cities. Since Burton seems to regard blacks as the source of all evil, and Lexington is 13% black, perhaps we should substitute one of the white urban runners-up such as Portland, Oregon or Colorado Springs, Colorado, each of which has a minuscule black population — but the results remain the same. Los Angeles is 50% Hispanic while Portland is less than 10% Hispanic, and LA is also much more heavily black; yet the two cities have very similar violent crime rates. How could any of these urban comparisons — or dozens of similar ones — produce the real world results they do if Burton’s theory is correct and Hispanics have twice the white crime rate?

Or consider the national cross-correlations I presented in my original article, which represent the polar opposite to “cherry-picking” a few cities to make a biased point. They are based on quantitatively examining the ethnic composition of all American cities across several different crime categories and several different years. And in nearly every case, the White+Asian and Hispanic results were very close or even indistinguishable. How could this be remotely possible if Burton’s theory is correct and Hispanics tend to commit twice as much crime as whites?

A theory absolutely resistant to any amount of conflicting evidence is best understood as constituting part of a secular religion, much like Marxism or the beliefs of those neocons who still continue to claim that Saddam did indeed have WMDs, which have been hidden away somewhere. Since Burton has seemingly chosen not to believe in reality, perhaps he should apply for a job at the Weekly Standard and spend his (well-paid) days tracking down those mysteriously missing WMDs.

As for Richard Spencer’s short piece Thoughts on Hispanic Crime, the first part of his focus is on the negative social indicators of American-born Hispanics compared to their immigrant parents. While some of this is certainly true, especially with regard to “conservative social values,” as I discussed above I think the claims of increased criminality have been greatly exaggerated. Furthermore, my strong impression is that nearly all American groups — immigrant or not, Hispanic or not — have recently shown a similar decline of social values from their parents’ generation, and this has long been a major topic of conservative complaint.

Meanwhile, as I briefly suggested in my article, the exceptionally positive news about Hispanic economic advancement has received almost no public attention. A couple of years ago Doug Besharov pointed out that just during the twelve years from 1994 to 2006, the poverty rate among Hispanics dropped by one-third, while the median individual income also rose by one-third. Most remarkably, this rapid rise occurred despite the continuing and massive influx of relatively impoverished new immigrants, which we might have assumed would produce a sharp decline in all these average numbers. All things considered, I’d think that this broad Hispanic economic rise may be as rapid as that of any group we’ve seen in modern American history.

Admittedly, whether these strong Hispanic gains represent a good thing or a bad thing depends upon your perspective. For example, the percentage of skilled blue-collar jobs held by Hispanics more than doubled during these twelve years, while the white percentage dropped by almost precisely the same amount. For many years, VDare.com has been running a regular “American worker displacement” column, highlighting exactly these sorts of statistics. But arguing that Hispanics are advancing economically and may be doing so at the expense of working-class whites is very different from arguing that Hispanics are failing economically. Although I’m no expert on this subject, my own impression is that the former — as endlessly documented by VDare — is much more likely the case than the latter.

Spencer’s final point is that even if we accept that Hispanics do indeed have approximately the same crime rates as whites, since Hispanics are disproportionately youthful, America’s crime will become disproportionately Hispanic. I certainly can’t dispute this simple logic, though the crime rates in the heavily Hispanic cities I examined hardly seem much cause for concern, since they tend to be the lowest in America.

The very heavy volume of the ongoing responses to my article has led Matthew Roberts to produce a web summarizing the current state of the debate, The Unzism Debate – Around the Web. Since Roberts has himself been a strong partisan in the debate, his perspective is hardly neutral, but his collection of articles should be useful to everyone.

And finally Austin Bramwell earlier this week published a piece on the American Conservative website making some sensible points. As a restrictionist and a conservative, he argues that since the data on Hispanic crime rates does remain somewhat murky while the consequences of mass immigration are irreversible, we should err on the side of caution by opposing it. Whether or not I agree with the actual conclusion, this seems like a very reasonable — and certainly a very “conservative” — position to take. By contrast, trying to pretend that numbers say something they don’t seems more a mark of simple innumeracy than of any respectable ideology.

Hispanic Crime III: Them vs. Unz

RonUnz.org • March 5, 2010 • 400 Words

With a flurry of critical responses to my article published in the last few days—four on Wednesday alone!—I had to scramble to produce my own rebuttal, but I think I covered most of the bases.

In particular, since the independent California data I have now provided seems so strongly consistent with the national numbers, I believe that critics will have a difficult time continuing to argue that my ethnic incarceration estimates are wildly off target.

One interesting aspect of this debate has been the almost total silence of the mainstream conservative media. Although immigration is an enormously hot and important topic nearly all the sharp responses to my detailed analysis have appeared in much smaller or more marginal publications such as Chronicles, Alternative Right, VDare, or Occidental Dissent.

To a considerable extent, I think this illustrates that today’s mainstream conservative publications serve primarily as propaganda outlets and ideological cheerleaders, with no thinking or analysis being required. Since the subject of immigration is a tricky one—with major donors and grassroots activists locked in sharp disagreement—keeping silent seems best option. Perhaps at some point, the Politburo at Conservative Inc. HQ will decide which side constitutes the official Party Line, and a dozen articles in a dozen different publications but with identical talking points will immediately issue forth, making their case in lockstep. Obviously, the actual facts or numbers will play no role whatsoever in determining ultimate decision. Everyone knows that believing in reality is just for liberals.

- “Model Minority?”

Jason Richwine, Alternative Right, March 3, 2010

- “Reply to Unz”

Steve Burton, What’s Wrong With the World, March 2, 2010

- “Ron Unz On Hispanic Crime: Nice Going, But So What?”

Austin Bramwell, The American Conservative, March 1, 2010

- “The Unzism Debate Around the Web”

Matthew Roberts, Conservative Heritage Times, March 3, 2010

- “Thoughts on Hispanic Crime”

Richard Spencer, Alternative Right, March 3, 2010

- “More on Hispanics and Crime”

Jason Richwine, Alternative Right, March 4, 2010

Meanwhile, a supportive column in America’s largest Spanish-language newspaper

- “Un mito sobre latinos”

Jorge Delgado, La Opinion, Feburary 23, 2010

And my own detailed reply to the various critics:

- “Them vs. Unzism”

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, March 4, 2010

PPIC Data on Hispanic Incarceration (Plus P.S.)

The American Conservative • March 9, 2010 • 1,000 Words

Kudos to Jason Richwine for his fine shoe-leather work in contacting the PPIC staff and determining that the ethnic incarceration figures provided in their 2006 report Who’s in Prison? were already age-adjusted, which he mentioned in a weekend blog item, The Great Hispanic Crime Debate. I do think that anyone reading the explicit text on pp. 4-5 specifying the ethnic incarceration rates per 100,000 for each ethnicity group would certainly not have gotten that impression. Just as in the case of the BJS reports, we see that professional demographers and statisticians are sometimes a little obscure in their expository language. However, the apparent age-adjustment already embedded in the PPIC California data hardly diminishes the conclusions I was claiming to draw from this very useful report.

As I had repeatedly emphasized in my original article and subsequent analyses, I was seeking an age-adjusted ratio of Hispanic/white incarceration rates across different states based on the limited data provided by the BJS reports, especially Table 2005-14. Since the state-by-state numbers provided in BJS Table 2005-14 were not stratified by age, I was forced to adopt the admittedly crude methodology of normalizing these totals to the relevant high-crime age male population, choosing to explore the different results for age cohorts 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44 in order to provide a range of rough estimates. The resulting age-adjusted national incarceration ratios for Hispanics/whites ranged from 1.13 to 1.31 depending upon the age cohort used, with the ratios in California being very similar.

Now my critics, including Richwine, had claimed that these results were wildly inaccurate, arguing that the official data I’d used from BSJ Table 2005-14 was highly erroneous (since it seemingly conflicted with national aggregated figures in a different BJS table). Therefore, I suggested we examine the PPIC California data, probably our most solid nugget of hard evidence, and compare it with the BJS numbers I had used for California. If the results were similar, this would tend to validate the accuracy of the BJS Table 2005-14 numbers and also support my own (crude) age-adjustment methodology.

It turns out that the age-adjusted Hispanic incarceration ratio from PPIC is approximately 10% higher than the California result I had derived for the 15-44 age cohort. Since PPIC presumably used some different (and probably much more sophisticated) age-adjustment methodology and also had access to far more detailed local demographic and prison data, a 10% difference in final results is hardly surprising. Given all the other vast unknowns, uncertainties, and demographic factors, I have never denied that my overall estimates of apparent Hispanic criminality might easily be off by 10% or 20%.

To the extent that my age-adjusted incarceration estimates have now been calibrated by the hard data from California (using PPIC’s own age-adjustment methodology) and seemingly found to be 10% low, I urge all readers to mentally revise upwards all my other incarceration estimates by that same 10% amount. (As an interesting cultural aside, the PPIC data is gender-stratified, and whereas in California Hispanic males are 48% more likely to be incarcerated that white males, among females the opposite is true, with white females actually being 30% *more* likely to be in prison than Hispanic females; since both my primary BJS data and also my criminality estimates are gender-aggregated, this brings the composite PPIC numbers a bit closer

to my own.)

Whether or not a revision of this size materially affects the central conclusions of my article must be decided by each individual reader. However, I will repeat that anyone who actually looks at the ethnic incarceration graphs from the PPIC report and compares them to the ethnic incarceration graphs found in my own article will notice a very striking similarity in appearance.

We should also remember that the age-adjusted incarceration ratio between whites from Texas or Georgia and whites from New Jersey or Illinois is roughly 300%. Perhaps that helps to provide a useful perspective to the apparent 10% Hispanic underestimate in my own

article.

P.S. I’d also like to mention an amusing aside which illustrates the typical sources of America’s “His-Panic” in the media and on the Internet.

Over the weekend, Randall Parker, a staunch anti-immigrationist who blogs at ParaPundit, posted an item entitled “Santa Barbara Crime Wave?”, calling attention to a headline story in his newspaper on the soaring rates of local violent crime. Now Santa Barbara’s white population is very affluent, but since Hispanics constitute about 40% of both the city and the county and are quite poor, they obviously must represent the source of this “spike in crime.” Therefore, he regarded his local evidence as a powerful refutation of my own article, and emailed me the details, adding a few notes of sarcasm.

Obviously a single data point cannot refute national correlations. But when I actually looked at the “tragic details” described in the Santa Barbara article, I noticed a very curious lack of specific data on homicides and violent crime. I also noticed that a day or two earlier, the newspaper had carried a top story on Santa Barbara’s severe budget crisis and resulting proposals by local elected officials to cut the law enforcement budget. This made me wonder whether the alleged spike in crime was real, or just a propaganda weapons being used in budget negotiations, and I mentioned my doubts to Parker.

Sure enough, once he located the actual crime statistics for his city, he discovered that crime had been completely stable or even declining for the last decade. Overall, 40% Hispanic Santa Barbara has a murder rate about the same as my own 95% white or Asian Palo Alto, and just one-third that of 95% white or Asian Beverly Hills, placing it close to Toyko, Japan. Presumably, if Santa Barbara’s murder rate had actually tripled, pushing it up to that of a notorious urban-hellhole like Beverly Hills, the story would have made the front page of The New York Times.

If I hadn’t bothered responding to the email, I have no doubt that excitable anti-immigrationists would have endlessly cited Santa Barbara’s horrific crime wave as further proof of the dreadful social impact of Hispanic immigration…

Hispanic Crime IV: Horrors---My Estimates Might Be 10% Off!

RonUnz.org • March 12, 2010 • 300 Words

As discussed in my blog posting from a few days ago, attached below, the discovery that the “Gold Standard” PPIC ethnic incarceration numbers for California were already age-adjusted means they appear to be about 10% higher than my own California estimates, which were based on a (presumably) different age-adjustment methodology. Whether or not this apparent 10% difference is significant enough to invalidate the overall conclusions of my original article remains a sharp point of contention, as indicated by the subsequent blog exchanges between myself and Jason Richwine.

Meanwhile, a different anti-immigrationist blogger pointed to the horrific current wave of murders in his own very heavily Hispanic city of Santa Barbara, arguing that it demonstrated the obvious absurdity of my crime analysis …then “readjusted” his claims when he checked and discovered that his local crime rates had barely changed over the last decade and the latest homicide rates were actually far below those of Beverly Hills. Maybe all the movie stars and moguls living in 90210 will soon begin moving to 40% Hispanic Santa Barbara to get away from life-threatening urban violence.

And Mike Males, a researcher at the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, has now published an ethnic analysis of violent crimes over the last thirty years in California which seems to strongly support some of my own conclusions.

- “PPIC Data on Hispanic Incarceration (Plus P.S.)”

Ron Unz, The American Conservative/@TAC Blog, March 9, 2010

- “The Great Hispanic Crime Debate”

Jason Richwine, The American Enterprise/EnterpriseBlog, March 6, 2010

- “PPIC Data on Hispanic Incarceration (Plus P.S.)”

Ron Unz, The American Conservative/@TAC Blog, March 9, 2010

- “One Last Note on the Hispanic Crime Debate”

Jason Richwine, The American Enterprise/EnterpriseBlog, March 10, 2010

- “Hispanic Crime Estimates”

Ron Unz, The American Conservative/@TAC Blog, March 12, 2010

- “The Myth of an ‘Immigrant Crime Wave’”

Mike A. Males, Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, Thursday, March 11, 2010

Hispanic Crime Estimates

The American Conservative • March 12, 2010 • 500 Words

I’m afraid that Jason Richwine’s latest posting in the Great Hispanic Crime Debate makes a very silly claim. He seemingly comes close to accusing me of intellectual dishonesty for pointing out that the PPIC Hispanic incarceration data for California is within 10% of my own California figures for the 15-44 age range, arguing that I was virtually pulling a rabbit out of my hat since I’d only presented the lower 18-29 age range figure in my original article.

This is complete nonsense, as anyone who has actually read my article surely knows. From the very beginning, I’d emphasized the methodological uncertainties of my (crude) age-normalization process, and therefore stated that I was repeating all my calculations for the three different ranges 18-29, 15-34, and 15-44 in order to minimize these problems.

The very first chart in my article provides the age-adjusted national incarceration data for all of these ranges, I mentioned that the numerical results ranged from 1.13 to 1.31 in my text, and I provided the white results for all the different age ranges in Chart 5 as well. Although for obvious reasons of space, most of my other charts necessarily focused on the results for a particular case, the 18-29 age range, they were clearly labeled as such, and since the relative national averages had already been provided for all range ages, anyone who wished could mentally adjust the figures accordingly. In fact, as I’ve already pointed out, the California figures are very close to the national averages for each age range, which is why the ethnic incarceration chart in the PPIC report looks so remarkably similar to my own Chart 1.

Indeed, quite a number of anti-immigrationists have cited my 31% higher Hispanic incarceration rate figure for the 15-44 age range as proof that although Hispanics may not be a “very high crime” population, they are certainly a “high crime” population relative to whites. So perhaps these individuals simply read my article more closely than did Richwine.

Richwine also seems to miss my point that all my results were gender-aggregated since that was the format of the BJS statistics I used; since Hispanic females apparently have much lower crime rates than white females, this can produce a noticeable adjustment. For example, the gender-merged Hispanic incarceration ratio in the PPIC report is actually around 1.4 rather than the 1.48 figure claimed by Richwine, which brings it pretty close to my own.

If the worst that anyone can say about my (admittedly very rough) estimates of Hispanic criminality is that I was probably off by 10%, I’ll hardly be mortified.

Meanwhile, Mike Males of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice has produced a nice analysis of California ethnic crime rates over the last three decades which seems to support my own conclusions.

Hispanic Crime: A Guide to the Debate

The American Conservative • March 15, 2010 • 1,500 Words

- His-Panic: The Myth of Immigrant Crime

Ron Unz, The American Conservative (Print Edition), March 2010

1. Jews and The American Conservative

Hunter Wallace, Occidental Dissent (62 comments), Jan. 26, 2010

“An important corollary is that Jews should be totally excluded from our media and organizations.”

2. According to The American “Conservative”, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is as Law Abiding as Mary Poppins

Statsholic Blog, Jan. 27, 2010

“The American Conservative Article can be described as nothing more than a damned lie, carefully designed to dupe the gullible and weak minded.”

3. Et Tu Amcon?

Mansizedtarget.com, Jan. 27, 2010

“Unz has demonstrated (again) a marked indifference to the survival of America as a coherent and historical entity.”

4. The myth of the myth of Hispanic lawlessness

The Inductivist, Jan 27, 2010

“The data closest to the act is self-report data.”

5. How Criminal Are Hispanics?

John Derbyshire, National Review/NRO, Feb. 1, 2010

“…An impressive analysis…Data talks, b-s walks…”

6. Blacks Have High Crime Rates, What About Hispanics?

Al Fin Blog, Feb. 1, 2010

“Unz suggests that there is very little difference in crime rates between ‘whites’ and ‘hispanics'”

7. Conservative analysis finds little evidence for ‘myth of immigrant lawlessness’

Agustin Armendariz, California Watch, Feb. 4, 2010

“Ron Unz, publisher of the American Conservative magazine, finds little hard evidence to support the notion that Hispanics are more violent than other segments of the population”

8. *** The Bogus Crime Wave

Alexander Cockburn, The Nation (Print Edition), February 2, 2010

“It’s all nonsense. There’s no crime wave swollen by brown gangbangers to city-destroying proportions.”

9. Ron Unz, Latinos, Liberals, and Scholarship

Katha Pollitt, The Nation/And Another Thing…, Feb. 11, 2010

“Has Ron Unz discovered something new? No.”

10. *** Exchange: Pollitt and Alexander Cockburn on the Hispanic Crime Rate

Alexander Cockburn, The Nation, Feb. 12, 2010

“Probably naívely, I thought it encouraging that a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan should devote its March cover and a substantial number of pages to a persuasive assault on right-wing hysteria about the supposedly astronomic crime rates of Hispanics in America.”

11. American Conservative Publisher Takes on the “Myth” of Immigrant Crime

Top stories of the day, Slate/The Slatest, Feb. 18, 2010

“Ron Unz takes on, and takes down, one of the far-right’s most cherished doctrines”

12. Response to Unz

Roger D. McGrath, Chronicles (21 comments), Feb. 18, 2010

“Kris Jensen’s moderately successful 1962 recording of ‘Torture’ kept running through my brain.”

13. Debunking the Myths of Lou Dobbs and Tom Tancredo about Latinos being Innate Criminals, Inborn Criminality

Raciality.com – and Brutality, Feb. 19, 2010

“The author Ron Unz, is a white male that has lived all his life surrounded by Latinos in his neighborhood, and he survived to tell this incredible tale.”

14. Counterparties

Felix Salmon, Reuters, Feb. 18, 2010

“Must-read piece in the American Conservative on hispanics and crime. Fantastic stuff”

15. The Myth of Hispanic Crime Rates

Heather Horn, The Atlantic Monthly/Atlantic Wire, Feb. 19, 2010

“Unz debunks the high Hispanic crime rate myth…the piece requires a full reading.”

16. *** His-Panic

Radley Balko, Reason/Hit & Run (105 comments), Feb. 19, 2010

“One of the more courageous endeavors I’ve seen from a political magazine in a long time.”

17. Myths about crime and immigration

David Freddoso, Washington Examiner/Beltway Confidential, Feb. 19, 2010

“If there is a problem of too much immigration, it doesn’t appear to be in the realm of violent crime.”

18. Latino Immigrants and Crime

Tyler Cowen (New York Times economics columnist), Marginal Revolution, Feb. 20, 2010

“An excellent article, full of good information.”

19. Hispanic Crime Rates

Alexandria, Crossroads of Civilization, Feb. 20, 2010

“This is a nice piece to keep available as we will inevitably face the immigration issue again.”

20. Illegal Immigrants: Not So Scary

Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune columnist, Feb. 21, 2010

“In Los Angeles, which is half Hispanic…the murder rate has plummeted to levels unseen since the tranquil years of the early 1960s”

21. USA Today, Et Cetera – Smart insights on the news of the day

USA Today (Print Edition), Feb. 22, 2010

22. *** Unzism, A Dangerous Doctrine

Matthew Roberts and Steve Burton, Chronicles (56 comments), Feb. 22, 2010

“Why would Unz deliberately distort data to minimize the phenomenon of Hispanic crime? Ideology remains a powerful force, and Unz’s ‘His-Panic’ fits into his overall vision of ‘Unzism.’”

23. *** Immigration: Facts vs. Ideology

Ron Unz, The American Conservative (29 comments), Feb. 24, 2010

“I must admit I find it a bit odd that a publication such as Chronicles would devote so much space to such a blistering attack upon views seemingly shared by nearly all of America’s historical leaders across the last couple of centuries.”

24. His-Panic

Republished by LewRockwell.com, Feb. 24, 2010

25. Un mito sobre latinos

Jorge Delgado, La Opinion (Spanish Language), Feb. 23, 2010

26. “Jihad” in Jackson Heights

David Kramer, LewRockwell.com, Feb. 24, 2010

“I live in Jackson Heights, so I can attest to the author’s observation that it is a very safe neighborhood”

27. *** Ron Unz Vanishes Hispanic Criminality…Not!

Edward S. Rubenstein, VDare.com, Feb. 24, 2010

“Unfortunately, Unz’ analysis of the immigration/crime link suffers from the same ambiguities and inconsistencies as those he (rightly) dismisses.”

28. *** Response to Rubenstein

Ron Unz, The American Conservative (85 comments), Feb. 26, 2010

“There are several strong caveats to Rubenstein’s finding.”

29. Chasing the Shadows

Editorial, The Waynesboro News Virginian, Feb. 28, 2010

“This mirrors the experience in Waynesboro, where despite the surge in the ranks of Hispanics, one can’t help but notice the absence of bloodthirsty gangs roaming the streets.”

30. Ron Unz On Hispanic Crime: Nice Going, But So What?

Austin Bramwell, The American Conservative, March 1, 2010

“Given the disastrous consequences if Mr. Unz is wrong, immigration proponents have the burden or proving with reasonable certainty that immigration will not make Americans less safe.”

31. Reply to Unz

Steve Burton, What’s Wrong With the World, March 2, 2010

“As usual, Unz is playing fast and loose with the facts.”

32. *** Model Minority?

Jason Richwine, AltRight, March 3, 2010

“Unz is wrong when he says that Hispanics are no more criminal than whites.”

33. The Unzism Debate – Around the Web

Matthew Roberts, Conservative Heritage Times, March 3, 2010

“Many on the open-borders left championed Unz’s article, noting that it was published in a “conservative magazine”…More sober minds were not so optimistic.”

34. *** Thoughts on Hispanic Crime

Richard Spencer, AltRight, March 3, 2010

“Demography is destiny, and the Latino demographic indicates that Hispanics will be filling up the prisons and committing the lion’s share crime in this country for decades and decades to come.”

35. *** Them vs. Unzism

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, March 4, 2010

A detailed response to Richwine, Burton, Spencer, and Bramwell

36. More on Hispanics and Crime

Jason Richwine, AltRight, March 4, 2010

“I want to correct a small but important error made originally by Ed Rubenstein and repeated by Unz in his response to me.”

37. More on the Hispanic-Crime Debate

John Derbyshire, National Review/NRO, March 5, 2010

“A few weeks ago I posted about Ron Unz’s inquiry into the question of Hispanic criminality. Rebuttals and counter-rebuttals have been bouncing round the blogosphere since.”

38. *** The Bogus Hispanic Crime Wave

Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch, March 5, 2010

“There are at least about 50 million Hispanics in America, and they’re projected to become 25 percent of the total national population. Whether they have high crime rates or low crime rates is a huge issue for the future of America.”

39. Hispanics and Crime

Matt Yglesias, ThinkProgress (55 comments), March 6, 2010

“Ron Unz has a fantastic piece in The American Conservative looking at the allegation that Hispanic immigration is leading to higher crime in the United States.”

40. The Great Hispanic Crime Debate

Richard Spencer, AltRight, March 6, 2010

“A great many pixels have bee spilt over Ron Unz’s March cover story in

The American Conservative, ‘Hispanic’”

41. The Great Hispanic Crime Debate

Jason Richwine, The American Enterprise/EnterpriseBlog, March 6, 2010

“To the extent that the PPIC report can corroborate anyone’s analysis,

it is mine-not his-that is confirmed.”

42. Unz Again

Steve Burton, What’s Wrong with the World, Mar. 8, 2010

“Ron Unz gets one thing right, a bunch of things wrong, and simply

ignores the most damning part of my reply”

43. Hispanic Crime

Levi Johnston, Publius Quinctilius Varus, March 8, 2010

“A debate over ‘spanic crime has paleoconservative “intellectuals” Ron Unz and Jason Richwine desperately trying to out tard each other.”

44. *** PPIC Data on Hispanic Incarceration (Plus P.S.)

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, March 9, 2010

The PPIC California data confirms my own Hispanic imprisonment estimates to within 10%

45. One Last Note on the Hispanic Crime Debate

Jason Richwine, The American Enterprise/EnterpriseBlog, March 10, 2010

“Unz downplays the size of his inaccuracy”

46. The Myth of an “Immigrant Crime Wave”

Mike A. Males, Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice, March 11, 2010

“Since 1980, Latino felony arrest rates (down 673 per 100,000 Latinos, or -26%) have fallen much faster than among Whites (down 171, or -13%). For violent felonies, White rates actually increased since 1980 (up 15%), while Latino rates fell (-29%).”

47. Mixing up immigration and crime: a new contribute

PraticheSociali, March 11, 2010

“Contrary to right-wing rhetoric and popular belief (examples here and here), there isn’t much of a correlation between Latino immigration in the U.S. and crime rates.”

48. Hispanic Crime Estimates

Ron Unz, The American Conservative, March 12, 2010

“If the worst that anyone can say about my (admittedly very rough) estimates of Hispanic criminality is that I was probably off by 10%, I’ll hardly be mortified.”

Hispanic Crime: Social Contract Debate

RonUnz.org • October 26, 2010 • 100 Words

“Debate on Hispanic Crime” with Ron Unz and Jason Richwine

Social Contract 2010 Writers Workshop, October 26, 2010

Ron Unz part 1. Ron Unz, publisher of the American Conservative, discusses the myth of immigrant crime. Ron Unz contends that crime rate among immigrants and illegal aliens – particularly hispanics – is much lower than commonly believed.

Hispanic Crime: A Postscript

The American Conservative • September 4, 2012 • 1,100 Words

Determining American reality is sometimes difficult due to the flaws of government statistics, with the contentious subject of race and crime being a perfect example.

The FBI publishes a Uniform Crime Report, providing a vast quantity of public data on crime and arrest statistics, including the recorded race of offenders. Anyone interested in learning the crime rates of blacks or Asians may easily do so, these days with merely a few clicks of the mouse on the Internet. However, Hispanics are categorized as an ethnicity rather than a racial group, and are therefore usually aggregated with whites, making it impossible to obtain Hispanic rates of criminality in the same easy manner.

Unsurprisingly, this vacuum of solid official information has frequently been filled with nonsense, as wild rumors of brutal MS-13 gang atrocities and Mexican drug cartel beheadings have influenced public perceptions of an American sub-population now numbering over fifty million, sometimes with unfortunate political consequences.

Given the importance of the topic, a couple of years ago I attempted to correct this confusion in His-Panic: The Myth of Immigrant Crime. I utilized several different analytical techniques to reasonably estimate the true rate of Hispanic crime in America, and all of these converged to the same conclusion, namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age and gender.

One of my approaches was rather elegant, and I was quite surprised it had not previously been utilized by the academic community. The crime rates for all of America’s major cities are easily found in the FBI data, while the racial composition of these same cities is provided by the U.S. Census. So I simply calculated the weighted correlations between these two data sets across several different crime categories and various different years, running these calculations both for all cities over 250,000 in population and also only those over 500,000 in size. In all these dozens of different cases, the urban crime correlations for white percentage and Hispanic percentage were almost always quite close, strongly implying that these two groups have similar crime rates.

Naturally, this conclusion provoked a tremendous storm of controversy across the Internet, with a vigorous and often highly vituperative debate raging for months, just as in the more recent case of my Race/IQ series. Since 2010 many of my more open-minded critics had gradually acknowledged that I was probably correct, but there remained some notable exceptions.

The debate on the topic has now suddenly been revived, with the exceptions diminished. For the last decade or more, one of the most highly regarded bloggers within the racialist community has been the individual styling himself “La Griffe du Lion,” whose dozens of lengthy quantitative analyses on race, crime, and IQ go back to 1999. Over the years, his degree of analytical detail has led to widespread suspicions that he is actually a prominent mainstream academic, hiding his extremely controversial racial views under a pseudonym.  Possible identities have been suggested, one of which has always seemed reasonably plausible to me.

In the past, La Griffe has claimed that Hispanics had a crime rate many times higher than that of whites with rates almost identical to that of blacks, “proving” this with all sorts of complex calculus formulas. When I raised some major doubts about his methodology, he was quite dismissive and insulting in his responses, and charged that I was simply ignoring “the stark facts” that “White and Hispanic criminality distributions differ profoundly,” and by over a full standard deviation. Naturally, he paid no attention at all to my own TAC article on the subject.

But for some reason, La Griffe has now ended several years of hibernation, and published a lengthy analysis concluding that Hispanics and whites have approximately the same crime rates, constituting a total reversal of his previous position. To my mind, the methodology he uses seems eerily similar to that of my own article, namely comparing the crime rates of major cities against their Census-based ethnicities. Perhaps as a nod to my own previous study and in his usual playful style, he presents the analysis in the form of a speech to the Union of Nationalist Zapatistas (UNZ). In any event, I am very pleased to have my 2010 analysis now completely confirmed via a somewhat different calculation by one of the foremost quantitative experts in the racialist firmament of the Internet.

The exciting word of a new La Griffe essay has begun to spread around the racial-blogosphere, with Steve Sailer announcing A New La Griffe essay!, and already attracting well over a hundred comments.  Reading through these threads tends to demonstrate the rather unimpressive quality of much typical racialist thought on the Internet, with most of the angry participants denouncing the incompetence of their erstwhile intellectual idol, and several even darkly suggesting that “La Griffe has to be Unz.” Presumably, the fact that prior to his current reversal, his published articles had almost invariably disagreed with mine on virtually every issue is powerful proof that I suffer from severe schizophrenia, and had created an anonymous Internet identity with polar-opposite views and a totally different writing style. Poor La Griffe—the tone of the comments suggests that his column may have put him on the road from racialist icon to forthcoming purge-victim.

Finally, I have a somewhat parallel postscript on my Race/IQ series. In my last column, I had highlighted my discovery that Arthur Jensen and Hans Eysenck decades ago concluded that Mexican-Americans had approximately the same innate intelligence as whites, with their much lower IQs being due to transitory socio-economic deprivation. I suggested that this historical fact might cause considerable consternation in IQ-activist circles, since Jensen and Eysenck ranked as the Marx and Engels of their movement, and purging them would be unthinkable. Nonetheless, the purge seems to have begun, as a racialist blogger calling himself “StatSquatch” not only rejected any notion that Jensen was his intellectual idol, but denounced Jensen’s techniques, claiming that “Jensen’s method of correlated vectors is terrible.” The same blogger had also earlier claimed that the weighted correlation of 0.86 I had found with regard to timewise Irish IQs was probably due to random effects.

Given that I claim no great expertise in IQ matters, while Prof. Jensen—although nearly ninety—is still alive and well and publishing at Berkeley, perhaps his numerous research errors should be brought to his attention. I suspect a certain academic email box is even now being filled with angry notes from “StatSquatch” and his friends.