I have discussed this topic of whether illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than natural born Americans and legal immigrants (the latter are deported if they commit a crime) many times. Even many Christians like to say that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than legal residents and citizens. I thought it might be a good idea to link to some evidence from RealClearInvestigations.

It says:

An analysis of the available statistics by RealClearInvestigations suggests that the crime rate of noncitizens is vastly understated. A separate RCI analysis based on estimates developed by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) suggests that crime by illegal aliens who entered the U.S. by July 21, 2024 cost the country some $166.5 billion. These criminals disproportionately entered the U.S. during the Biden administration.

Even if you are not the victim of a crime by an illegal immigrant, we all have to pay for law enforcement and property damage. We all have to pay for higher insurance rates. We all have to pay for criminal courts and prisons.

Here are two more ways that the numbers of offenses are not counted accurately.

Numbers of past offenses not being counted:

The data on migrants who have been processed also understates the problem. Criminals rarely commit just one crime. For example, from 1990 to 2002, in the 75 most populous U.S. counties, 70% of those convicted of a violent felony had a prior arrest, and 56% had a prior criminal conviction. In 2023 in Washington, D.C., the average homicide suspect had been arrested 11 times before committing a homicide. Data for 30 states shows that 60.1% of criminals released from prison in 2005 had been arrested again within two years, and 73.5% had been arrested within four years. The ICE data set provides a single entry for each individual.

Numbers of people who are not arrested / convicted not being counted:

Most violent crimes don’t result in an arrest, so looking at arrests or convictions in these other countries will underestimate whether illegal aliens are criminals. Across all U.S. cities in 2022, only 35.2% of violent crimes resulted in an arrest. While 50.6% of murders resulted in an arrest, just 24.1% of rapes produced an arrest, 22.7% of robberies, and 39.9% of aggravated assaults.

On Tuesday night, I watched a video of a TikTok that had gone viral, in which a white leftist young woman was talking about the murder of Laken Riley. She was complaining about why the news had to report that the accused murderer was an illegal immigrant. And she went on to say that white males were the most dangerous people in America, because they committed the most crimes. I just thought it was interesting to think that many people are voting for lax border security, thinking that it will not make them less safe. This is even after we’ve seen young women like Laken Riley, Lizbeth Medina, Jocelyn Nungaray and Rachel Morin suffer violence and even death at the hands of illegal immigrants.

I can understand that saying things like what this young leftist woman was saying is a good way to virtue signal. But the real-world effect of open borders is that a lot of innocent people – people who pay taxes in order to fund law enforcement – will get hurt, raped and even killed. Young women who vote for leftist policies are actually causing harm to other young women, even as they drone on about the patriarchy and how much they fear toxic masculinity. You really have to wonder whether they learn anything at all about how the world really works in college.

So, I’ve noticed that lately, many Christian, conservatives express Christian and conservative convictions when they are in a Christian, conservative audience. But when they are in the company of secularists, feminists and socialists, they keep quiet. In this post, I’ll explain why I think that using evidence from studies helps us to be bolder, then we’ll see a study about homeschooling.

Well, I can only explain why I am so inclined to fight. Just because I have an alias online, that doesn’t mean that I don’t fight for what I believe in under my real name in person. I take every opportunity to push for authentic Christian (not woke) truth claims and values in person. It’s especially important for Christians and conservatives of color to do this, in the current culture.

But how can you fight with people? I recently faced off against a bully in my company at a large company meeting. I had heard that this guy was a yeller, and had previously yelled at other employees. And that he was extremely progressive, and in a liberal echo chamber where he never heard any intellectual conservatives or Christians. I attacked him on two issues: socialized medicine and gun control. By using studies to explain how I changed my mind, I was able to escape his caricature of Christian conservatives as stupid fundamentalists who don’t think critically.

With that said, here is a report from the Wall Street Journal about a new study that you might be able to use to be bold with people who oppose homeschooling. (Full text of the article here)

It says:

Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard Law School professor, sparked debate in May 2020 by calling for a presumptive ban on home schooling. Home-schooled children, Ms. Bartholet asserted, are less likely than their school-attending peers to receive a “meaningful education” and more likely to be subject to physical abuse or indoctrination by “extreme religious ideologues.”

[…]Ms. Bartholet criticized home schooling for both diminishing children’s educational attainment and undermining their physical and mental health. One of us (Ms. Chen) recently examined how school type affected adolescents on a range of long-term outcomes into young adulthood, including educational attainment, mental health and social integration. Looking at data on more than 12,000 children of nurses (mostly white and mostly well-off) surveyed from 1999 to 2010, we estimated the effects of school type independently from other factors such as socioeconomic status, race and region.

To the extent that college graduation is a fair proxy for having received a “meaningful education,” Ms. Bartholet was right to point to a disadvantage for home schooling: The home-schoolers in our sample were 23% less likely to attend college than public-school students. This may reflect lower attainment in learning or less interest in attending college, but it may also be a result of admissions policies at some U.S. universities that disadvantage home-schooled students.

Parents want their kids to be well-educated and professionally successful, but they also want them to be healthy, happy and virtuous. By this broader measure of success, home schooling has advantages. Among the students we examined, home-schoolers were 33% more likely to volunteer, 31% more forgiving and 51% more likely to attend religious services in young adulthood than those who attended public school. (“Levels of forgiveness” were measured on a self-reported four-point scale, which other research has shown predicts some subsequent health and well-being outcomes.) The difference in religious participation has public-health implications, since those who attend services regularly have substantially lower risks of alcohol and drug abuse, depression and suicide. They also have a lower risk of premature death for any reason than those who never attend.

The picture of the home-schooled student that emerges from the data doesn’t resemble the socially awkward and ignorant stereotype to which Ms. Bartholet and others appeal. Rather, home-schooled children generally develop into well-adjusted, responsible and socially engaged young adults.

The libertarians at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) reached out to the researchers, and they got more information about that concern about lower rates of university attendance:

I reached out to Case and Chen for additional comments on their study’s findings, including how they think the homeschooling data and outcomes might have changed since 2010, when their data set ended.

“We are also glad to see that some colleges, including some top-tier colleges, have become more flexible in their admission policies for homeschoolers over the past years,” Chen responded.

Indeed, more colleges and universities have implemented clearer guidelines and policies for homeschooled students in recent years, and many are now eager to attract homeschooled applicants. In 2015, Business Insider noted that homeschooling is the “new path to Harvard,” and in 2018 the university profiled several of its homeschooled students.

The researchers also suspect that the well-being gap between homeschoolers and public school students has widened over the past decade, with homeschoolers faring even better.

“For instance, social media apps have come to smartphones over the past few years, leading to their widespread adoption by teenagers and even younger children,” Chen told me this week. “Some prior studies suggested that such increasing smartphone use may have contributed to the recent huge spikes in adolescent depression, anxiety, and school loneliness. Cyberbullying, sexting and ‘phubbing’ have also become more common in children’s daily lives, especially in school settings. We might expect that these issues may be less common among homeschoolers than their public school peers.”

I think if you are going to do homeschooling, it will have to be very practical. I think the world is too dangerous right now. We need to focus on learning practical skills that pay. So, don’t focus on things classics and Latin early on. I love the classics, but only the classics that teach something practical should be relied on. Instead, math and computer science should be the most important subjects, along with economics. Or choose the hard sciences like biology, chemistry, physics, etc. Get your STEM degrees, get your private sector work experience, then homeschool your kids with a focus on STEM.

I do think that after you get a job, then you should go back and work on the classics, literature and philosophy. But the financial situation we are in – with so much government debt, so many people in debt, and so many people on welfare – suggests that we should make sure that we are independent of the government and debt-free as quickly as possible.

(Image source: NHERI.org)