In many ways, this is all old news. Ewing and his colleagues point out that studies over the past 100 years typically reach the same conclusion: That you’ll find lower crimes rates among immigrants than native-born Americans. They point to studies in three different decades, which attempted to show that criminality increased among the immigrant populations. Instead, they each concluded the opposite.

Some suggest that crime in the undocumented immigrant community is underreported because those individuals are afraid of reporting crime because they may be detected and deported. However, one cannot avoid considering another intuitive and logical dynamic: These same undocumented immigrants are more likely to operate within the law in order to avoid detection and deportation, creating safer communities as a result. That’s the conclusion Ewing and his co-authors reached, but they determined “the terminological sleight-of-hand inherent in the government’s definition of ‘criminal alien’ perpetuates and exacerbates the fallacy of a link between immigration and crime.”

Misuse & Distortion of Data

Consider this, too. Even if data could be presented to show higher crime rates among undocumented immigrant communities in some areas, that would not mean that the overall crime rate is higher for undocumented immigrant communities. If this sounds glaringly obvious, it’s nonetheless an argument that’s repeated constantly in the media, by politicians, and, of course, in the comments section of any given web site. It’s much like someone arguing there is no global warming because they had a cold winter in their town: Data from a single area might differ from a national average, but that does not mean the overall statistics are invalid.

So data is easy to misuse. Sadly, it’s also easy to fabricate.

Take, for example, Tom Tancredo’s claim in an August 2015 Breitbart article that “illegal aliens” accounted for 30 percent of murders in many states. He offered more detailed statistics including the following:

“Between 2008 and 2014, 40 percent of all murder convictions in Florida were criminal aliens. In New York it was 34 percent and Arizona 17.8 percent.

“During those years, criminal aliens accounted for 38 percent of all murder convictions in the five states of California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, while illegal aliens constitute only 5.6 percent of the total population in those states.”

Problem is these statistics are dead wrong. So wrong that Politifact wrote a detailed rebuttal of Tancredo’s piece and demonstrated that his figures were greatly inflated — sometimes fives times larger than any verifiable figures. They gave him a flat “false” rating on their Truth-O-Meter. However, the Breitbart piece stands today without correction despite the Politifact takedown. The researcher Tancredo quoted even reached out to Breitbart to complain his work had been referenced improperly. A year later, there’s still no indication of any of these inaccuracies or their rebuttals appending the piece. Consequently, it continues to be shared on social media among the far right as evidence of horrific murder rates by undocumented immigrants. Although it’s complete fiction.

Of course, Breitbart doesn’t care to correct Tancredo’s shoddy diatribe because it reinforces a narrative about undocumented immigrants the website embraces. And it reinforces what many people want to believe.

“You can find many examples of any particular group of people committing horrible crimes: white men, white women, black men, black women, I mean, everyone. You can find the anecdotes, but that has nothing to do with crime rates.” — Walter Ewing, American Immigration Council

Similarly, many critics are fond of reaching for anecdotal evidence to paint undocumented immigrants as violent criminals. Walter Ewing agrees that these anecdotal stories do not undermine overall statistics, either: “You can find many examples of any particular group of people committing horrible crimes: white men, white women, black men, black women, I mean, everyone. You can find the anecdotes, but that has nothing to do with crime rates.”

On those stories shared by grieving parents at the Republican National Convention, he noted, “You could have just as easily gotten someone up there to talk about Sandy Hook and the dangers posed by white men with automatic weapons.”

Undocumented Immigrants in Federal Prison

Did you know there is a high number of undocumented immigrants in our federal prisons? Breitbart offers a figure of almost 37 percent, while Trump says there are “hundreds of thousands” of undocumented immigrants in our state and federal prisons. Trump’s figure (unsurprisingly) is flat-out wrong. In fact, undocumented immigrants make up four or five percent of our nation’s entire inmate population. While closer to the truth, the statistic Breitbart presents deserves further examination.

First, the overall federal prison population is relatively small compared to the overall prison population — about 10 percent of it in 2013. “So you get a very distorted picture of the immigrant population if you only look at federal prisons,” Walter Ewing told me.

Second, the overwhelming majority of these undocumented immigrants (76 percent in 2013, for example) are in federal prison for immigration violations. “You get people in there for immigration violations. That does not make them violent criminals,” says Ewing on this topic. “It just means because they’re immigrants, they’re in the federal system.” Yet the far right uses the statistic to infer that those individuals are in federal prisons due to horrific violent crimes such as drug trafficking, human trafficking, murder and kidnapping.

It’s important to examine the circumstances that created this situation, too. As this Pew report explains, the growing presence of undocumented immigrants in federal prisons can be attributed to the tougher enforcement of unlawful reentry convictions. In other words, immigrants were increasingly being administered federal charges because “they have entered or attempted to enter the U.S. illegally more than once.” For example, “Between 1998 and 2010 alone, growth in the number of immigration offenders accounted for 56 percent of the increase in federal prison admissions.” And in 2005, the U.S. Border Patrol began to significantly reduce the number of voluntary returns they allowed upon seizing immigrants, sending them to prison instead. Additionally, they streamlined the process for prosecution under a “zero-tolerance” program called, well, Operation Streamline. In other words, the undocumented immigrant population is growing in federal prisons because we’ve gotten much, much tougher on undocumented immigration.

This raises two important points: First, though the harshest critics of undocumented immigrants enjoy highlighting these federal prison statistics, they typically downplay the actual reason they are imprisoned. Secondly, you could argue the data shows the system is working as more individuals are being captured and their offenses are being treated more severely. (Some might argue, too severely.) So those who offer this data point should also acknowledge that more undocumented immigrants are being prosecuted than ever before. You’re not likely to see Donald Trump or Breitbart or others of their ilk highlight that fact, though.

Given these arguments, of course, some critics will respond that even one violent crime, one death at the hands of an undocumented immigrant is too many. After all, such a tragedy wouldn’t have happened if the undocumented immigrant weren’t here. But this emotion-laden argument still thrives on ignoring the data showing undocumented immigrants aren’t committing acts of violence at rates equal to native citizens. It’s a convenient argument because it sounds logical, but it ignores that violent crimes exist regardless of who is committing them. It typically hopes to act in service of the idea that we should deport some 11 million undocumented immigrants from the country, despite their overall decidedly peaceful status.