In the dry heat of Texas, where the sun bakes the land and shadows stretch long into the evening, there is a quiet truth whispered among the numbers, a story told by statistics. The tale is not one of fear, though some might wish it to be, but one of hard facts, carved into the bedrock of Texas arrest records. Between 2012 and 2018, the numbers spoke, and what they said was clear: undocumented immigrants in Texas committed fewer crimes than the native-born.

The numbers don’t lie. For violent crimes—those bloody, visceral offenses that set towns on edge—undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens. The drug crimes that ruin families? Again, their arrest rate was a mere fraction of their native-born counterparts. And for property crimes—theft, burglary, arson—they were arrested at a quarter of the rate of those born under the banner of stars and stripes.

You wouldn’t think it from the rhetoric. There’s a picture painted by those who want to stoke fear, the one that shows waves of illegal immigrants flooding across the border, bringing crime with them. But the data from the Texas Department of Public Safety does not bear that out. It’s a stark contrast, these records, separating documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, and native-born citizens with mathematical precision. The story that emerges isn’t one of chaos, but of calm—calm, and a lower crime rate.

The researchers, they dug deep, sorting through records that spanned seven long years. They looked at the arrests—each one a moment of a life interrupted, a thread snapped in the great tapestry of Texas life. Homicides? Undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens. Drug crimes? Less than half again. Property crimes? Even less. The rates stayed low, steady as the slow roll of a tumbleweed, while the arrest rates for native-born citizens climbed over time.

Still, some might say an arrest is not the same as a crime, and they’d be right. Arrests are a measure of law enforcement action as much as they are of lawbreaking. But in the face of these numbers, even that argument loses its weight. The arrests themselves—rare and infrequent as they are—tell the story. There is no uptick, no rising tide of undocumented crime. The wave feared by so many is but a ripple, barely disturbing the surface of the Texas plains.

In the end, the researchers ran their tests, pored over the data, and came to a conclusion. For all the talk of immigrant crime, the numbers show something different: undocumented immigrants, far from the specter of violence and lawlessness they are sometimes made out to be, offend at rates far lower than those born and bred in the United States.

There’s a quiet dignity in the facts, a stubborn resistance to fearmongering. The truth, laid bare in arrest records, offers a simple answer to a complicated question: undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes. Fewer violent crimes, fewer property crimes, fewer drug crimes. The numbers don’t lie. The land, as always, remains the same—enduring, calm, indifferent to the stories we tell ourselves in the heat of the day.

Source: The National Institute of Justice https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-offending-rate-lower-us-born-citizen-rate