More on the "Do illegal immigrants cause crime?" debate

The occasionally off-balance Espresso Pundit links to Tom Maguire’s conservative but rigorous Just One Minute blog, debating the premise of the NYT’s Sunday piece looking at Arizona crime figures.

(While the anti-immigrant forces harp on the supposed crimes committed by immigrants, the facts show that crime in the state has been trending broadly down for a decade.)

Maguire makes an interesting point:

That while crime is down greatly in cities like Phoenix, a careful parsing of FBI figures shows that crime is up in non-city and rural areas:

Now, note that the number of crimes is down even in smaller cities, though declining population forces the crime rate higher.

The steep rise in crime in rural areas, though, is interesting. The rate rise is nearly 50 percent. Is that due to alleged crimes committed by illegal immigrants?

Neither Greg Patterson nor Maguire make that case.

As the debate continues, these, it seem to me, are the central questions:

1) First, obviously, are the crimes committed by illegal immigrants … or just good old-fashioned god-fearing, gun-toting, wife-beating thoroughly Caucasian and all-American Arizona stock?

2) Similarly, what kind of crimes are they—car thefts, armed robbery, the sort of things that might be associated with the lurid idea of a predatory immigrant moving north?

3) Rural Arizona is a big place. Are the crimes happening in border towns or up north?

4) What number of crimes are we talking about, anyway? Again, the rate of increase is high.

In sheer numbers, though, the increase totals a bit more than 100 new crimes committed in an area the size of … well, the size of Arizona.

Ninety-nine percent of the state is rural—and the rural population totals about 4 percent of the state’s.

And 100 crimes equals … one third of one percent of the number committed in Phoenix and Tucson.