The Lid: It’s one of the great liberal lies, illegal aliens commit fewer crimes than American citizens or legal immigrants who are not yet citizens. A post on this site in early January used data from Texas to prove that claim to be nonsense. The Federation For American Immigration Reform (FAIR) has taken it even further. FAIR used “incarceration data from the federal government’s State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) and compared it to the public records of state and local prison data” from Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Texas, and Washington. What they discovered was on average, Illegal aliens are three times more likely to commit crimes than legal aliens and American citizens.

Taken together, these ten reporting states represent a statistically significant sample. Although the calculations in this report are specific to those states, they include 65 percent of the total illegal alien population in the U.S. Therefore, even if the majority of unlawfully-present foreigners in the states not covered were never arrested, the rate at which illegal aliens are incarcerated would not change appreciably.

These numbers are for local violations only, it does not include illegals who are serving time in federal prisons, or have committed federal crimes which include immigration-related offenses. MORE