In case you were not aware, the current president elect, Donald Trump, began his campaign with a choice quote:

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people. It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East.

This has been debunked, like, a bajillion times, but given that it is a bit of bad social science that has propelled someone into the white house, it might be worth explicitly dealing with.

First off, there is always a difficulty in trying to actually get at the question of "who commits crime". The only real practical way to do this on a large scale is by mining data from inmate populations, but given issues such as sentencing disparity and well attested biases within police forces across the country this data set is pretty tainted. Still, it is what we have, and going by it, you cannot say that either immigrants in general, Hispanics in general, or Hispanic immigrants commit crime at a higher rate than native born (nice chart about halfway down the page).

This report gets even more damning to Donald Trump's criminological analysis when you start slicing out details. For example, across the board immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native born. This is true of literally every group, from the relatively minor disparity among Puerto Ricans to the massive disparity within SE Asians. But here is the kicker--one of the largest disparities is within none other than Mexicans! Immigrant Mexicans have a remarkably low incarceration rate, much lower than native whites! Maybe Mexico is sending its best! Certainly the crime rate among Mexicans in America is incomparably lower than among Mexicans in Mexico.

Now there is actually a lot to be said about the immigrant/native disparity, but Ill just note that the major terrorist attacks in both the US and France have tended to be committed by second generation rather than immigrants. There is something to be said about this.

Anyway, the second bit to deal with is the whole "they are sending" as if it were an active policy on the part of Mexico. This claim was reiterated by Trump during the first GOP debate, I'm not sure if he repeated it afterwards. Anyway, he has yet to produce any evidence for this policy, but it is worth noting that Mexico's share in the population of unauthorized immigration has dropped recently, and Central America and China has risen. Many of these central Americans are best described as refugees.

I must therefore conclude that when Donald Trump was making this claim he had not carefully examined the relevant statistics and social policy research, or at least applied a very flawed analysis to it. It hurts me to say, but I fear the president elect of the United States may not actually have a strong grasp on the disciplines of social research that are relevant to public policy.

I doubt the fucker has even read Durkheim.