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.
Read More – American Conservative: His-Panic
Via Radley Balko who notes:
For a magazine co-founded by anti-immigration paleocons Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, the story risks alienating a hell of a lot of the magazine’s readers.
See also Balko’s article “The El Paso Miracle.”
February 24, 2010 at 12:59 am
Many Hispanic criminals are in the country illegally, so their cases tend to be handled by the federal courts. Unz curiously chose not to include data from federal prisons in his article.
Additionally, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health indicates that Hispanics admit to committing more crime than the non-hispanic white population: http://bit.ly/bkxbQH
February 24, 2010 at 1:03 am
Derek – Unz explains why he choose not to include data from federal prisons in the article.