Immigrants found to be significantly less likely to commit crimes than the US-bornhttps://phys.org/news/2024-03-immigrants-significantly-commit-crimes-born.html
Existing Evidence on Immigrant and US-born Incarceration Rates. Notes: This figure plots historical incarceration rates of immigrants and US-born individuals from Moehling and Piehl (2014) as well as modern incarceration rates from Butcher and Piehl (2007). The historical incarceration rates are based on US-born and immigrant individuals aged 18-44 who were incarcerated in state correctional facilities in eight “high immigration states:” Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Michigan, and California. The modern incarceration rates correspond to institutionalization rates among all US-born and immigrant men ages 18-40 from sub-samples of the decennial Censuses. Credit: NBER (2023). DOI: 10.3386/w31440Some Americans believe that undocumented immigrants are a criminal threat to society. Former President Donald J. Trump has leveraged this assumption to inflame the rhetoric around immigration from the U.S.-Mexico border.
A study co-led by Northwestern University economist Elisa Jácome provides the first historical comparison of incarceration rates of immigrants to U.S.-born citizens.
Using incarceration rates as a proxy for crime, a team of economists analyzed 150 years of U.S. Census data and found immigrants were consistently less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the U.S.
Starting with the 1870 U.S. Census—the first to include the full population, including those formerly enslaved—through the most recent in 2020, which collects data nationwide, including from correctional facilities, the researchers measured the gaps between immigrant and U.S.-born levels of incarceration.
Over that 150-year period, they found that immigrants' incarceration rate was only slightly lower than that of U.S.-born men. However, in the more recent time period, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens and 30% less likely relative to U.S.-born whites.
"Our study shows that since 1870, it has never been the case that immigrants as a group have been more incarcerated than the U.S.-born," Jácome said.
... "The impact of immigration on the economy is a multifaceted topic, and crime is just one of the factors," Jácome said. "To get a holistic picture, policymakers should also account for research, invention, and services that are being provided because of immigrants.
"To the extent you want to make a cost-benefit statement about immigration, you must also look at benefits lost if immigration was reduced."
Ran Abramitzky et al,
Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-born, 1850–2020,
National Bureau of Economic Research (2023)
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31440/w31440.pdf---------------------------------------------------------------
Americans struggle to distinguish factual claims from opinions amid partisan biashttps://phys.org/news/2024-03-americans-struggle-distinguish-factual-opinions.htmlHow well do Americans succeed at distinguishing statements of fact from statements of opinion? The answer: Not very well at all, according to new research co-written by a team of University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign scholars.
Americans struggle to tell the difference between statements of fact and statements of opinion—a troubling trend that has grave implications for civic discourse and for navigating the torrent of political information that citizens receive every day, said Jeffery J. Mondak, a professor of political science and the James M. Benson Chair in Public Issues and Civic Leadership at Illinois.
"The capacity to differentiate between a statement of opinion and a statement of fact is vital for citizens to manage the flood of political information they receive on any given day," said Mondak, a co-author of the research and an affiliate of the Center for Social and Behavioral Science. "There's a huge amount of research on misinformation. But what we found is that, even before we get to the stage of labeling something misinformation, people often have trouble discerning the difference between statements of fact and opinion."
The study, published by the Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review, examined whether Americans can differentiate statements of fact (2 + 2 = 4, for example) versus statements of opinion ("Green is the most beautiful color"), with a particular focus on political statements.
Respondents were asked to categorize 12 statements about current events as statements of fact or statements of opinion. The researchers found that 45.7% of respondents performed no better than a coin flip at the task.
"What we're showing here is that people have trouble distinguishing factual claims from opinion, and if we don't have this shared sense of reality, then standard journalistic fact-checking—which is more curative than preventative—is not going to be a productive way of defanging misinformation," Mondak said. "How can you have productive discourse about issues if you're not only disagreeing on a basic set of facts, but you're also disagreeing on the more fundamental nature of what a fact itself is?"
Partisan bias played a strong role in the root cause of error, the scholars said.
"It's not merely the case that there were a lot of incorrect responses, but that many of the errors were not random," he said. "They were systematic errors because many respondents formed their answers to fit their partisan narrative. For example, the statement 'President Barack Obama was born in the U.S.' is a statement of fact that could be incorrectly redefined as a statement of opinion, depending on your partisan lens."
For citizens who are concerned about misinformation, the findings suggest not only that people are resistant to corrections of misinformation, but also that they're susceptible to manipulation, the researchers said.
"Our analyses show that the problem of misinformation includes an underappreciated dimension in that people do not just disagree on the facts, they also disagree on the more fundamental matter of what facts are," Mondak said. "The results also suggest that faulty fact-opinion differentiation can severely complicate the correction of misinformation because a consensus of 'We can agree to disagree' can emerge even for questions of indisputable fact. Well, you can't just 'Agree to disagree' that 2 + 2 = 22.
Matthew Mettler et al,
Fact-opinion differentiation,
Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review (2024)
https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/fact-opinion-differentiation/
