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I up-voted your comment because I want to believe it's a sincere question. You wouldn't ignore a subset of crimes, but you might give more a more detailed brea

I up-voted your comment because I want to believe it's a sincere question. You wouldn't ignore a subset of crimes, but you might give more a more detailed breakdown of statistics if that is necessary to avoid misleading people. For example, lets say I pointed out that people who go to the doctor are more likely to die than people who don't go to the doctor. In fact, the more people go to the doctor, the more likely they are to die. That's pretty misleading since it doesn't control for how healthy the person is. People are going to assume that statistics are meaningful and don't just give out raw data that is totally meaningless due to selection bias. So, if you are comparing illegal immigrants living in the US to US citizens, guess what, 100% of the illegal immigrants have committed a federal crime, but almost no US citizens commit federal crimes. But this is dumb to quote, since yea we already know they are here illegally, it's right in the stupid name. What we actually care about is whether the people living in this country without a visa are going to shoot us in the face or steal our stuff, since if they are here committing a bunch of crimes like that we can honestly ask whether we should kick them out or not. This question has been studied for over 100 years and the answer is ALWAYS NO. https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing-evidence https://www.cato.org/blog/illegal-immigrants-crime-assessing...

whatthesmack 7y ago
> This question has been studied for over 100 years and the answer is ALWAYS NO. I always hear this brought up, but I’m not sure one should be so confident in that conclusion. The answer could always be “no”, but that doesn’t mean the answer is right. Using obviously-incomplete data to come to a conclusion like that seems to imply an agenda. An honest answer would be “we really don’t know”. If most illegal aliens don’t report the crimes of other illegal aliens, isn’t there a possibility that illegal aliens do commit more crime than US persons? There certainly is! Also, look further into the murder imprisonment rate differences between illegal aliens and US persons. https://bongino.com/do-illegal-aliens-really-commit-fewer-crimes/ https://bongino.com/do-illegal-aliens-really-commit-fewer-cr...
- ltbarcly3 7y ago
  > I always hear this brought up, but I’m not sure one should be so confident in that conclusion. I can't explain how statistics work in a post on hackernews, but you should understand that it is possible to quantify uncertainty, and authors of studies are asking the same questions you are when they think about their data. Well, maybe some authors of some studies are morons or have a political axe to grind, but when basically all the studies agree that is called a strong consensus and whenever a consensus exists in a field there are people trying very hard to overturn it. Overturning an accepted 'truth' in a field will basically make your career, it is highly significant, and this is partly what keeps science on the right track. So we can be about as confident in this as we can in anything. Also conservative talk radio isn't a reputable source to quote, mostly because political pundits (on both sides) lie almost all the time. It's basically their job description.

whatthesmack 7y ago

> This question has been studied for over 100 years and the answer is ALWAYS NO. I always hear this brought up, but I’m not sure one should be so confident in that conclusion. The answer could always be “no”, but that doesn’t mean the answer is right. Using obviously-incomplete data to come to a conclusion like that seems to imply an agenda. An honest answer would be “we really don’t know”. If most illegal aliens don’t report the crimes of other illegal aliens, isn’t there a possibility that illegal aliens do commit more crime than US persons? There certainly is! Also, look further into the murder imprisonment rate differences between illegal aliens and US persons. https://bongino.com/do-illegal-aliens-really-commit-fewer-crimes/ https://bongino.com/do-illegal-aliens-really-commit-fewer-cr...

ltbarcly3 7y ago
> I always hear this brought up, but I’m not sure one should be so confident in that conclusion. I can't explain how statistics work in a post on hackernews, but you should understand that it is possible to quantify uncertainty, and authors of studies are asking the same questions you are when they think about their data. Well, maybe some authors of some studies are morons or have a political axe to grind, but when basically all the studies agree that is called a strong consensus and whenever a consensus exists in a field there are people trying very hard to overturn it. Overturning an accepted 'truth' in a field will basically make your career, it is highly significant, and this is partly what keeps science on the right track. So we can be about as confident in this as we can in anything. Also conservative talk radio isn't a reputable source to quote, mostly because political pundits (on both sides) lie almost all the time. It's basically their job description.