There are so many holes in this. It really rests on the belief that the surest sign a study has uncovered the truth is that evil people become mean towards the heroic researcher. That’s about 60% of this analysis.

When you eliminate that 60%, the rest of the essay summarizes studies that sound like they’re based on cherry-picking. Design a study to compare high-crime (Appalachia) native areas with low-crime (Silicon Valley) immigrant areas and claim that proves “immigrants” are more law-abiding. The essay makes no distinction among immigrants — it treats all immigrants the same, as if teenagers from the slums of El Salvidor have an equal propensity to violence as middle-aged Asian software developers.

I was interested enough to dig deeper and look at one of Charis Kibrin’s papers. To read you, you’d think that the best way to lower violent crime still farther would be to open the border to any and all comers, since they’re all more law -abiding than American bitter-clingers.

Kibin, in her paper “Different than the Sum of its Parts: Examining the Unique Impacts of Immigrant Groups on Neighborhood Crime Rates.” makes a lot more sense than you.

“A final set of models disaggregate immigrant groups based on their observed geographic clustering in the Southern California region (see Appendix Table 6 for categorization). In model 4 of Table 4 for violent crime, we find that three of the groups are positively associated with violent crime rates, whereas one is negatively associated with violent crime rates. Neighborhoods with more immigrants in the group we have labeled ‘‘Chinese’’ (from the countries China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Indonesia) have lower violent crime rates. On the other hand, neighborhoods with more immigrants from Mexico, from the countries in the ‘‘Jewish’’ group (Russia, Ukraine, Israel) and from countries in the ‘‘Central American asylum seekers group’’ (countries are El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua) have higher violent crime rates, holding constant the other measures in the model. A 10 percentage point increase in immigrants from Mexico is associated with 8.7 % more violent crimes, whereas a 1 percentage point increase in immigrants from the ‘‘Jewish’’ group is associated with 3 % more violent crimes.”