Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #2022: 13,000 murderers … something something something … illegal immigrants? It’s our theme for the coming week.

 

Today there’s a big splash in the news, that (something-something-something) illegal immigrants have 13,000 convicted of homicide among them.  This, based on what Rep. Gonzales posted on Twitter.  You can see images of the original ICE letter.

That immediately struck me as odd.  Number-wise.  Very odd.  For a few reasons.

First, that’s a lot.

The population that is drawn from is the roughly 7 million cases on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement “non-detained docket”.  That is, persons pending (in effect) their deportation trial or hearing, that are not being held in custody, but instead have been sent out into the community while they await trial.

So, rough cut, that 13,000 works out to a rate of about 185/100,000 population.  Where the population at issue is illegal immigrants who have are living in the community while awaiting their deportation trial.

Compare that to the annual homicide rate in the U.S., which works out to be about 6/100,000.  Even then, only about half of homicide cases are ever resolved (i.e., somebody is convicted).  So the number of persons convicted of homicide in the U.S. works out to be about 3/100,000.  Restrict that to adults, and you could stretch that to 4/100,000 adults per year.

So the apparent rate of homicide conviction (or maybe just being accused of homicide) in this docket population appears to be about 50 times higher than I would have expected.

But …

Multiply by 3 for the high Latin America homicide rate.  Homicide rates are higher in the countries that account for the bulk of souther-border immigration.  So, where the U.S. runs about 6/100,000, the median for Latin America appears to be about 3 times that amount (per eyeballing Wikipedia).

Multiply by (say) 10 for the fact that this ICE number is lifetime history of having been charged with or convicted of homicide.  The U.S. homicide statistics were per year, an annual rate.  The ICE figure isn’t an annual rate.  It’s “any history of” conviction or pending charges for homicide.  But this is something akin to “ever been convicted or or charged with a homicide”, over their prior lifetime.  A fudge factor of 10 years seems at least plausible, given the ridiculously large fraction of the U.S. population that has “a criminal record”, as opposed to persons charged in any one year (reference).

And at that point, the number starts to make sense.  Those two adjustments:

  • For the higher violent crime rate in typical countries of origin.
  • For “any criminal record” versus “convicted last year”.

And those two factors take you from 3/100,000/year homicide convictions in the U.S., to an expected value of about (3 x 3 x 10 = ) to an expected rate of 90/100,000 with any history of homicide within a relatively young, mostly Latin-American population.

So, just assuming these are average Latin Americans, and that ICE has (belated) access their full criminal history, the ICE figures now begin to make sense.  Just those two adjustments put you in the ballpark of their 13,000 murderers (180/100,000).

But “ICE Docket” is a wild card.

What’s a docket?  That’s a list of pending ICE court cases.  Where those cases are about whether or not to deport the person.

Now it all comes together.  I think.  Here’s my guess as to what’s going on.

First, as the original letter makes clear, if the ICE knows that an illegal immigrant in their custody has a history of serious crime, they do not let go of that person.  For sure, convicted of murder would qualify. So this 13,000 is people that the ICE found out about, after-the-fact.  How many were kept in detention, and so did not end up on this “docket”, is not known.

That factor, by itself, should have depressed the overall rate, and so does not explain why the observed rate is about twice what you would reasonably expect.

Second, it’s a good bet that “the docket” is enriched in individuals with history of serious crime, relative to other immigrants.  That is, of the 7M persons currently on the ICE “docket”, a lot of those people will have some adjudications, and will move rapidly onto and off of the docket.  By contrast, once the ICE finds out that an individual was convicted of a serious crime, that individual remains “on the docket” until that person is given a court order for deportation. And if that that person then does not obey that deportation order, they come back onto the docket and get convicted of failing to obey that court order.

What I’m saying is, it’s a good bet that those cases stay “on the docket” a lot longer than average. Which means that at any point in time, “the docket” is enriched in those cases, relative to plain-vanilla deportation hearings.

Just to drive that home, the mix of crimes on the ICE table (Twitter reference above) is oddly skewed.  rom the same data source showing 13,000 murderers, there are just 77,000 convicted of a traffic offense.  So, on the ICE docket, for every six persons convicted of a traffic offense, there’s one person who was convicted of murder.(?)

For the U.S. as a whole, by contrast, there are about 630,00 DUI convictions per year.  (Calculated from the data table in this source.)  Conversely, there appear to be about 10,000 homicide convictions per year (out of 22,000 or so homicides — the rest are unsolved.)  So each year, the U.S. as a whole has 60 DUI convictions for every homicide conviction.  Or about 10 times as many as show up among the immigrants on the ICE’s list.

So that’s a bit odd.  Whatever the underlying list is, it doesn’t appear to be a cross-section of crime.  It seems heavily skewed toward homicide.

Addendum, the next day, say no more:  As it turns out, the ICE list contains people who are literally in state and federal prison, that is, not detained by ICE.  Presumably, ICE continues to track them so that ICE can kick them out of the country when their prison term is up.  Here’s a quote from CNN reporting on this issue, quoting the Department of Homeland Security:

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

Summary

All this tells me is that whatever you think this 13,000-murderers figure represents, it’s not the risk of murder in a given year. 

To be clear, near as anyone can tell, the legal immigrant population is more law-abiding that average, and the illegal immigrant population is about as law-abiding (otherwise) as the U.S. native population.  This, based on analysis of data from Texas, it was just over 2.2 individuals per 100,000 population, just a bit below the U.S. average.

Source:  Cato institute

 

You could, in theory, I guess, avoid any chance of this happening by locking up everyone on the ICE docket — everyone awaiting a deportation hearing.  Change the law so that you have to lock up all 7M people who are currently on the ICE docket, but have been released back into the community.  Taking $50,000/person/year as a reasonable guess at the cost of incarceration (based on eyeballing this map), it would only cost about a third of a billion dollars per year.  Plus some large up-front cost to triple the size of the U.S. prison system, which currently incarcerates just over 2M.

To be clear, you couldn’t just lock up that 13,000.  That’s because, as noted above, their history of homicide conviction was not know at the time the ICE (briefly) held them.  (If it had been known, ICE would not have let them go.  They aren’t crazy, after all.)  At the time they were in ICE custody, you don’t know which 13,000 persons had some prior (unknown-at-the-time) homicide conviction.

So to get them all, you’d have to lock up all of them.  And good luck getting that decision past any reasonable judge, under current law.  You’d likely have to amend the laws to make that legal.

None of this matters.  Republicans have found a statistic that has really horrible optics, so they’re running with it.  Whatever it means. 

As with Haitians eating dogs, there’s no way they’re not going to flog that until their base loses interest.  I’m guessing that, as Haitians-eating-pets was the theme for last week, and 13,000 murderers is going to be the theme for the week ahead.

But passing legislation to reduce the logjam in these court cases, and get these people out of the country sooner?  I’m guessing the Dems aren’t going to be smart enough even to mention who is responsible for killing the legislation that would have helped resolve this issue, within the law.  And the Republicans who killed a seemingly bipartisan attempt to address this huge backlog of cases are certainly never going to mention that they did that.

So, we’re up for another week of macho-sounding stuff on this issue, from the Right.  But no attempts to address it.

It’s just too good a story to pass up.  Even if the people telling it have no idea what it means.  Or whether 13,000 is an unreasonably high or low number.

And, for sure, the folks flogging this are going to ignore any hard numbers on the rate of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the U.S.  Because those numbers don’t tell the story they want to tell.

This is the way my country works now.

Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

 

Skim milk is too high in calories.

Just saying that … leaves me shaking my head.

Think of this as round 2, of this prior post below, that briefly profiled burgers, eggs, and beans as protein sources.  This time around, it’s off-the-shelf animal-based protein supplements. 

Less-than-meat, in a good way, is how I look at this. Continue reading Post #2021: Animal-based protein supplements, digested.

Post #2020: Reflections on my 66th birthday

 

Today is as dreary as it gets.  Cold drizzle all day long.  Might as well write something to match.

My retirement

Is not a cruise ship ride.

My retirement currently shapes up like this:

  1. I have many regrets about my life.
  2. I can’t do anything material about any of them.
  3. I’m going to die before I spend all my money.
  4. I don’t believe in an afterlife.

Suppose, for a moment, that’s the hand you’d been dealt.

What are you supposed to do with that?

So far, the only answer I’ve come up with is “live with it.”

And, thanks to an early retirement, contemplate it at length.

A well-stocked purgatory

Most retirement-related advice will have been written by or about “successful” retirees. Those who have managed to arrive at a fulfilling and meaningful golden-age promised land.

I, by contrast, would best describe my retirement as a well-stocked purgatory.

Physically, I want for nothing.

The joke being that, unfortunately, I want nothing.

To the contrary, I’ve been focusing on döstädning.  Or, at least, getting rid of enough unwanted items and junk to start approaching a state of döstädning.

Now throw in a year-long diet, on top of that.  No, scratch that.  A permanent state of diet.

For 11 straight months, I lost five pounds a month.  But this month, the weight loss stopped.  I have reached a “plateau”.  Apparently this is a near-universal phenomenon of significant weight loss, though damned if I can find any coherent explanation of it.

I’m still obese by any standard measure. I’m not losing any more weight.  And I must continue “to diet”, lest I put that weight back on.   All pain, no gain.

Apparently my body was OK with losing the beer gut, but the man-boobs have to stay?  I’m not seeing a lot of cosmic justice there.

And then there’s the whole thing Dave Barry wrote about in a column titled “Red Hot Memories”.  The propensity of your brain to bring up memories of the most cringe-worthy moments of your life.  As I age, I increasingly suffer from the ailment he described.

If I were tasked with designing purgatory, that would surely be part of the plan.

Conclusion

The weather sucks today.  Maybe I’ll go out to the garage and throw some stuff away.  Maybe I’ll buy myself a nice new sweater.

Nope, got it:  Chicken soup.  I’m gonna make a pot of chicken soup.  Then I’m going to eat some.  Then we’ll see what’s next on the agenda.

Welcome to my retirement.

Post #2018: The five prices of silver, while I can still recall them.

 

I just want to write this down before I forget it, in case I ever need to know this again.

For a silver bullion item of a given weight and purity (fineness), the following prices should occur, from lowest to highest:

Lowest:  Scrap value is what a refiner will actually pay you, to take your silver for re-melting.  It’s what you can sell silver for, if all you can sell it for is scrap.

Generic bar sell-to price is what a bullion dealer will pay for “any bar, any condition”.  If it’s a bar, of the stated weight and purity, they’ll pay that for it.

Coin and good delivery list bar sell-to price.  This is what a dealer will pay for name-brand or mint-issued coins and bars.

Spot:  The price you see quoted on the business news.  This is the price for current delivery of bulk metal of a known fineness, per troy ounce of pure silver content.  This is flanked by or maybe is one of the bid and asked price.  Doesn’t much matter as bid and asked are rarely far apart in an orderly market.

Generic bar buy-from or list price.   This is what a dealer will sell you a generic, any-issuer any-reasonable-condition bar for.

Coin and good delivery list bar buy-from price. This is what a dealer will sell you these items for.

Note that I don’t list “melt value”.  That phrase gets tossed around a lot, and a whole lot of people will show you the “melt value” of your purchase as spot price (maybe even spot asking price) times your weight of pure silver.  I don’t think that’s how it works, for selling silver as scrap (to be re-melted).  Near as I could tell, the price I’d get is the scrap price.  If all I could do is have the silver melted down.  But this fictitious “melt value” shows up often enough to be worth calling out.

As Gresham’s Law would suggest, for silver bars, dealers seemed to be one or the other, with regard to “good” bars or any bars.  Kitco (top-drawer) seemingly only deals in name-brand like-new-quality merchandise.  Buy or sell.  By contrast, those who bought generic bars sold both generic and name brand bars, at different prices.  I think that all makes sense.  Maybe.

The only practical upshot is that if a bar can be sold as a name-brand good-quality bar, it should be.  It’s worth several percent of the value of the bar.  Barring that, if it can be sold as “a bar”, instead of scrap silver, it should be.  Likewise.  And only as a last resort would you send a bar of any sort, in good condition, off to be remelted, and only receive scrap value for its weight in silver.

Conclusion.

God willing, I will never need to know this again.

Post #2016: Two Black Women Stole the Election, the re-run

 

If this is already obvious to you, just skip it.  The gist is that the current Springfield, OH kerfuffle is kind of a re-run.

Do you recall the thumb-drive-vote-fraud-two-Black-women thing?  Republicans alleged vote fraud, based on a clip of routine surveillance video in some polling place.  They were completely wrong, but The Right ruined the lives of the poll workers in that video.

And now, instead of death threats for two Black women, it’s a barrage of bomb threats (and who knows what else) for Springfield, Ohio.

But if you trace the arc of the story, these stories really run parallel, and they spring from the same root.

And that root is Republicans’ willingness to promote stories based on their “stickiness”, truth optional.  I argued this point two posts back.

What I’m saying is, the Republicans constructed or merely “amplified” these false stories because they were “sticky”. They were memorable for their target audience.  And not for any higher purpose, unless you consider lying to make a fictional point an adequate substitute for actual government policy.

Take the first one.  I mean, that just ticks all the boxes, doesn’t it?  Name your phobia.  Fear of a) computers, b) black people, and c) women.  In addition to “vote fraud”.

For the Republican base, that’s a triple-sticky story, and way too good to pass up.  I think it literally made no difference whatsoever to the Republican party whether or not that story was true.

Promulgating that particular lie ruined the lives of the poll workers involved.  Who, I am guessing, where chosen solely because they were Black women, and they made some movement over the course of the day that could plausibly be (mis)-interpreted as something nefarious passing from one to the other.

So, school’s closed in Springfield, OH due to bomb threats?  Not intrinsically different from death threats against those two poll workers.  Just not as well-targeted.

Haitians eating pets.  Again, they just could not pass that up. As discussed earlier, that’s at least a double-sticky.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?  I guess that’s the viewpoint.  And when they’ve run that dog until it won’t run any more, I’m sure there’ll be something to take its place.

I prefer a more reality-centered discussion, if possible.

OTOH, the explicit defense, by the Republican Presidential candidate himself, is that he heard it on TV.  He most emphatically heard somebody on TV talking about Haitians eating cats and dogs.

In effect, he said he just retweeting.  So it’s OK, then, right?  Whatever it is, somebody else said it first.

Truth optional?  I think that overstates it.  It gets every bit as much consideration as the inevitable fallout.  Which is to say, none.

People re-tweet things because they like them.  And for a lot of people, I’d say truth is optional there, too.  So maybe Trump is the way the world works now.

 

 

 

 

Post #2014: Stocking up on dog meat.

 

People routinely (and perhaps purposefully) misunderstand statistics on immigration.  In this post, I gather more years of data for the interesting top line of this table, from my just-prior post:

Source:  Department of Homeland Security.

Note that there was no increase in the estimated number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. during this period.

Immigration Rule #6

There is no annual count of the illegal immigrants who successfully crossed the border.  That, for the simple reason that they didn’t get caught.  I went over that in these posts:

Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?

Post #1928: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands, part II

Almost every number you hear quoted as “illegals entering this country” is the count of illegal immigrants who got caught.  Which is kind of a “duh” statement, because, as above, if you didn’t catch them, you can’t directly count them.  Technically, yeah, they are “individuals who crossed into the U.S. illegally.”  Stepping onto U.S. soil is what made it lawful for DHS to arrest them.  But they aren’t illegal immigrants who now live here.  The majority were caught within a few miles of the border and then deported.

Anyway, if you hear “two million” or so, that’s the folks who got caught in any recent year.

Best guess, as summarized in the prior posts on this topic cited above, your odds of making it across the border are maybe 30% to 50%, depending on who’s doing the estimating, and from what data source.  That implies somewhere between one and two million per year successfully illegally crossed the U.S. southern border during that latest surge in attempted illegal immigration.

By contrast, if you hear “ten million”, that’s an estimate of the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. at any given time.

And if you can do simple math, and note that the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. doesn’t change much from year-to-year, you quickly realize that there must be a pretty large flow of illegal alien residents who leave the U.S. each year.  Which is really the only point of this post.

Surprise:  There is no strong trend in illegal U.S. residents, through 2022.*

Source:  2015-2018 report, Department of Homeland Security.

* Edit the next day:  There’s now an extended discussion on methodology below.  Original post follows. 

Turns out, based on the best available information, there is no upward trend in illegal U.S. residents.  The slight downward trend evident at the end of the graph above continued right on through 2022.  (As you can see from the very first table posted here.)

If you prefer a simplified graph:

Source:  2022 report, Department of Homeland Security.

Not to restate the obvious, but that’s a couple of decades, over which the estimated number of resident illegal aliens has been fairly stable, at around 10 million.

As I noted in the just-prior post, this count of illegal residents is an indirect estimate.  So there is some reason to question the validity.

That said, the method is consistent, because there are no huge jumps from one Census to the next.  And if you bother to read the report, you can see that these figures jibe with just about every other credible estimate.

It’s reasonable to ask whether this apparent stability is just an artifact of methodology.  I’m guessing not, even though this is remains rooted in the decennial Census.  Note that the numbers remained reasonably stable through three different Census counts. and that, for the most recent counts, DHS uses the annual American Community Survey (also done by Census).  If there had been a big uptick in self-reported foreign-born individuals in 2021, that should have shown up in the 2021 American Community Survey data that form the basis for the last data point shown.

If you read the methodology section of the DHS report in full, there appears to be essentially only one estimate that disagrees with the DHS estimate, and that’s based on some questionable and untestable assumptions.

Pew Research Center (Pew, July 2024) estimates that the number ticked up by 0.5M in 2022.  Their methodology is similar to the one used by DHS.  So, plausibly, the next DHS estimate will also show that uptick.  Looks like the official number from DHS will not be updated until Spring of 2025.

Assuming DHS has that all correct, the bottom line is that this is the only credible estimate that exists, for the number of illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S.  The nuance you get from Pew is that this latest wave of attempted illegal immigration has, in fact, modestly increased the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. 

If I manage to find another estimated that differs markedly (other than the one addressed in the DHS document), I’ll add that in here.

No surprise:  There is no trend in illegal U.S. residents.

This should really not be a huge surprise, unless you believe in magic.  Because these folks have to make a living somehow.  And the number of jobs available to illegal immigrants is small, and the types of jobs are limited.

Well, there’s no legal way for illegal immigrants to get government aid. I went over that in the posts cited above.  Pick a Federal entitlement program and do the research, and you’ll come to the same conclusion.

(Though, technically, I guess if you show up at a hospital ER and are having a medical emergency, the ER must treat you due to EMTALA.  And I think schools have to accept illegal kids.  But you know what I mean.  There’s no life of taxpayer-funded luxury awaiting illegal immigrants.  Any government resources targeting immigrants are available to legal immigrants only, for all intents and purposes.  Illegal immigrants are, for all intents and purposes, un-people according to the government.)

Ponder that a second, and the stability of that population begins to make sense.  If you are here illegally, the only way you can stay here is to get a job.  (That, or rely on private charity of some form.)

And if there are only so many jobs in the U.S. that can routinely be filled by illegal immigrants … then there’s sort of a natural economic capacity for the U.S. to host an illegal immigrant population.

For example, there are only about 1.3M hired crop workers in the U.S.  Of those, about half are illegal immigrants.  (They are a much smaller share of all farm workers, because the majority of farm workers are self-employed or unpaid family members of farm owners.)

Source:  USDA, farm labor.

Note that the vast majority of illegal residents work in industries other than agriculture.  The table above accounts for well under half-a-million illegal U.S. residents.  Best estimate, there are more than seven million illegal immigrants holding down jobs in the U.S. (Pew Trust, 2020).

Near as I can tell, they do pretty much exactly the kind of jobs you’d think they’d do.  Just think of any job that you wouldn’t want to do.

How can this be?

The one thing I am hazy about is the details on hiring.  How can legitimate, tax-paying businesses hire illegal aliens? I mean, yeah, I checked, and it’s unambiguously illegal:

Source:  U.S. Department of Justice.

This newspaper article provides a matter-of-fact view of it.  It’s a straight-up case of don’t ask, don’t tell.  Amongst the common tricks used for long-term employment of illegal aliens by tax-paying businesses are the following:

  • Declaring workers to be independent contractors instead of employees.
  • Requiring no verification of documents.
  • Contracting out the hiring of labor — so that the folks who nominally “hired” the workers aren’t the ones who pay them.

Conclusion:  Now the Republican rhetoric makes sense.

By far, the most mind-blowing statistic I ran across is that, in aggregate, about five percent of the U.S. workforce consists of illegal aliens. 

And, I’m guessing, unless the size of the work force increases, or the fraction of jobs that are amenable to illegal immigrant labor increases, that’s about where it’s going to stay.

Which, in turn, pretty much determines the long-run size of the U.S. illegal-immigrant population.

And in the end, the stability of that resident illegal alien population makes perfect sense, from the standpoint of the underlying economics.

The upshot is that we have a large resident illegal alien population, of a stable size, due to private enterprise employing them, and a lack of government enforcement of the law.

But if you’re Republican, you can’t say that. 

And, in fairness, the bleeding hearts on the other side of the aisle are unlikely to try to kick those folks out of their jobs, if they even could.   They might even consider that undocumented immigrants fill a necessary and productive role in the U.S. economy, on average.  And that, in some sectors such as agriculture, how can I say this, there would be supply-chain disruptions without them.

To put it as plainly as possible, just about nobody in power (with any sense) wants to fire the seven-to-eight million illegal aliens currently doing our least-desirable jobs.  Certainly not all at once.  Some out of sympathy, but the rest out of pragmatism and profit motive.  And sure-as-shootin’ not when the unemployment rate is in the low single digits.

And, to an economist, I have to say, the current multi-tier system for immigrant (non-citizen?) labor looks almost as if it were designed to extract the most possible “value” (in the economic sense) out of that labor.  You offer some guest-workers a 10-month visa, but you limit the number of those that you offer.  The remainder of your guest worrkers, those not here legally under a visa, are then open for whatever the market will bear, in terms of exploitation.

At any rate, back to Republican policy:  So they offer “sticky” stories.  Haitians eating pets.  Crime waves.  Stealing American jobs.  Just throw that at the wall, and see what sticks with their constituents.

So, unfortunately, it looks like dog meat is on the menu for the foreseeable future.  That, because it is verboten for one political party to discuss the private-enterprise financial engine that supports our resident illegal alien population.

* CAVEAT ON THE METHODOLOGY

If you read one of the tiny-type sections above, you’ll see researchers at the Pew Trust recently updated their estimate of the resident illegal-alien population.  They do more-or-less what DHS does, in terms of methods.  They appear to be seeing an uptick in the resident illegal alien population starting starting around 2020.  (And, if you look closely at the DHS graph, they show the same thing, just skipping one data point.)

Source:  Pew, July 2024

If you look carefully at the end of the DHS estimate above, they too show a similar uptick between 2020 and 2022.  They just didn’t fill in a 2021 number.

To the extent that I understand it, they used the count of all foreign born based on a roughly 1% sample (roughly 3 million) records in the 2022 Census ACS PUMS file.  That’s one of the main drivers of change in that resident-illegal-alien number.  (That, and changes in the separate count of legal citizens who were foreign-born.)

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, except to say that the 2022 numbers are the most recent available.  And they are good numbers, if you believe that recent illegal immigrants will answer the American Community Survey (in proportion to the extent that Census thinks their demographic does), and admit to being foreign-born.  (Or, alternatively, they are good for showing trends, if any presumed proportional undercount remains constant.)

The only thing missing, really, is a “flash estimate” of what the population is likely to be today, after two more years of high rates of attempted illegal immigration.

I don’t think anybody does one, at least not publicly.

So the best you can say is that, through 2022, there was only a modest uptick in the resident illegal immigrant population of the U.S.