Trump Bashed Other Countries for Their Immigrant Crime Rates. Here’s Why He Didn’t Mention the U.S.

The Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh and Reason‘s Katherine Mangu-Ward debate National Review‘s Rich Lowry and Steven Camarota from the Center for Immigration Studies on the benefits and drawbacks of mass immigration. Thursday, October 2, live on stage in Washington, D.C. Get your tickets here.

President Donald Trump’s recent appearance at the 80th United Nations General Assembly was in the news because he was temporarily stranded on a broken escalator, and a teleprompter gave out during his speech. Those momentary inconveniences distracted from the content of his speech, which revealed an important truth about immigration—through omission. 

Trump criticized many countries for allowing immigration that was supposedly destroying their countries. “According to the Council of Europe, in 2024, almost 50 percent of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants,” he said. “In Austria, the number was 53 percent. In Greece, the number was 54 percent. In Switzerland, it’s 72 percent.”

Did you notice which country he didn’t mention? Donald J. Trump, the man elected president by complaining about immigrants bringing crime to these shores, didn’t point to high immigrant incarceration rates in the United States. That’s because immigrant incarceration rates are low in the U.S.—far below those of native-born Americans. There were no numbers for him to appeal to. Through omission, Trump admitted that his potent criticism of immigration, used to such effect on the campaign trail, rests on a cracked foundation.

That’s not to say that immigrants don’t sometimes commit crimes in the United States. The murders of Laken Riley and Jocelyn Nungaray by illegal immigrants were brutal crimes that galvanized voters and Trump’s campaign. They and their families deserve justice, but many voters got the impression that illegal immigrants are mostly violent criminals and that Trump would clean up the mess. Tragic individual crimes aside, illegal immigrants are much less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans.

The American federal system means that most criminal laws and their enforcement are on the state level. Texas is one of the few states that identifies both legal and illegal immigrants through the criminal justice system. Crime data from Texas show legal and illegal immigrants had criminal conviction rates 58 percent and 48 percent lower than native-born Americans, respectively. In 2022, legal immigrants had a homicide conviction rate 62 percent below that of native-born Americans, and illegal immigrants were 36 percent below. 

For studying immigrant criminality, you can’t do much better than focusing on Texas: It borders Mexico, has the second-largest illegal immigrant population of any state, and it’d be hard for all but the most committed populist to claim there’s a conspiracy in the state’s Republican-dominated government to suppress evidence of immigrant criminality. 

Texas is just one state, but nationwide estimates also show that legal and illegal immigrants have a much lower incarceration rate than native-born Americans. The difference is so great that native-born Americans are 267 percent more likely to have been incarcerated by age 33 than all immigrants.

The data showing low immigrant criminality are underscored by how badly Trump’s deportation plans are stalling. The administration assumed that immigrant criminality would make it particularly easy to identify and deport them. “The worst of the worst,” was the term used by Trump’s border czar Tom Homan, who’s having trouble meeting deportation targets because there just aren’t that many illegal immigrant criminals. If there were, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents could just wait at police stations and jails instead of ambushing immigrants attending their court hearings and raiding warehouses, restaurants, and car assembly plants.

It’s worth mentioning that Homan was recently investigated for allegedly accepting a $50,000 cash bribe offered by FBI agents, but Trump’s Department of Justice isn’t prosecuting the case. This administration’s lead team of immigration enforcers may yet end up with a higher criminal conviction rate than illegal immigrants. 

It’s refreshing to hear the president implicitly admit that immigrants have a lower crime rate in the United States—after all, Americans didn’t vote for Trump because of immigrant incarceration rates in Europe. Still, it would be better if the officials in his administration admitted it as well and eased up on the deportation efforts.