Science Vs - Immigration

Episode Date: March 9, 2017

We head to a farm in Alabama to find out what happened after thousands of immigrants left the state. Did it create more jobs for Americans and what happened to the crime rate? We speak to economists Prof. Samuel Addy, Prof. Jennifer Hunt, and Prof. Brian Bell to find out. Science Vs Live! Come see our live show on the science behind red wine, coffee and chocolate - could our favorite treats actually be good for us? Thursday 3/23 at The Bell House in Brooklyn, NYC. Get your tickets here.   Credits: This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, Wendy Zukerman, and Shruti Ravindran. Kaitlyn Sawrey is our senior producer. Production assistance by Ben Kuebrich. We’re edited by Annie Rose Strasser. Fact Checking by Michelle Harris. Sound engineering, music production and original music written by Bobby Lord. Thanks to Dr Anna Piil Damm, Professor Charis Kubrin, Assistant Professor Jorg Spenkuch, Professor Kristin Butcher and Ramiro Martinez… as well as the Zukerman family. Selected References:2016 NAS report: The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration (with ‘key messages and conclusions’ starting on page 202.ACLU analysis of “Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act,” HB 562003 analysis and 2015 analysis on how immigrants affect wages Brian Bell’s 2013 study on the effect of two different immigration waves on crime in the UKFBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Database  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Wendy Zuckerman, you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet Media. Okay, what I'm looking at, is that the wall? I think that's the wall. Yeah, it's a bloody big fence. Restricted area, no trespass. I'm about 20 metres from the wall. I can't even... Why am I so nervous? Because I'm in a restricted area, that's why I'm nervous. OK, here it is. This is the wall. This is what it's about.

This is the border between America and Mexico. I kicked the wall, just so you could hear it. The wall says, Made in the USA. I'm at the border between the US and Mexico, about an hour's drive away from San Diego. And despite what you might hear in the news, and as you just heard, on this part of the border, there's already a wall. It's about 20 feet tall and is made of big metal posts and strong wire mesh.

Within minutes of kicking it, Border Patrol arrived in a white SUV. Oh! How you doing? Hello. How are you? Good, thank you. I was just looking for the Friendship Monument. You're not allowed to actually come up to this fence, really.

Oh, OK. Sorry. A fence? Wall? Fence? I guess it's more of a wince. And a recent Pew survey found that about 40% of Americans want a longer wince, one that runs the full length of the border with Mexico. The goal is to stop immigrants from crossing the border. Yes, immigration.

We've been hearing about it a lot recently. President Donald Trump has raised many concerns over the last few months about the problems that he believes immigrants are causing America. At first, he was focused on undocumented immigrants, but now he's shifted to a wider group of foreigners. President Trump has signed executive orders that call for thousands more immigration enforcement agents

and expands the pool of immigrants prioritised for deportation. And all sorts of concerns about immigrants have been dominating cable news. Illegal alien criminals. Taxpayers spend $17 billion for the American-born children of illegal aliens, known as anchor babies. You're going to pay, I'm going to pay. Social welfare type of policies and programs. Victims, families who have lost people to violent illegal alien felons.

So on today's show, we're moving away from the border and into the facts. Because when it comes to immigrants, there's lots of opinions. But then there's science. Science versus immigration is coming up right after the break. for 10 p.m. with alerts. Voila! I won't be getting carried away and staying out till 2. That's stop-loss orders on Kraken. An easy way to plan ahead. Go to kraken.com and see what crypto can be. Non-investment advice.

Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. After decades of shaky hands caused by debilitating tremors, Sunnybrook was the only hospital in Canada who could provide Andy with something special. Three neurosurgeons, two scientists, one movement disorders coordinator, 58 answered questions, two focused ultrasound procedures,

one specially developed helmet, thousands of high-intensity focused ultrasound waves, zero incisions, and that very same day, two steady hands. From innovation to action, Sunnybrook is special. Learn more at sunnybrook.ca slash special. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done? Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI.

And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back to Science Versus, the show where we pit facts against foreigners. There are over 40 million people living in the U.S. today who were born in other countries. Some came here legally, some didn't. But in total, they make up more than one in eight people in the US population. So what are all these people doing to the American economy and the crime rate? On today's show, we're going to dig into some of the statements that we've been hearing about immigrants. One, are immigrants taking American jobs? Two, are immigrants driving down wages? Three, by getting a free education and other services,

are immigrants taking more from the government than they give? And four, we're going to find out if immigrants drive up the crime rate. And just a quick note before you go thinking that because of this accent, I must love immigrants. Here's a psych out. I'm actually a US citizen. That's right. I was born in California. The accent is fake. No, the accent's actually real, but I was born here, raised in Australia. Funnily enough though, being born in the US is enough to class me as an American, not only to Border Patrol, thankfully, but also to scientists who research immigration. So we're going to use that definition on today's show.

You're born here, you're American. That means when we say immigrant, we're talking about anyone who was born in another country and then came here. So that includes if you've been here for two years or 20 years. And a lot of talk in America is about undocumented versus documented immigrants. Unfortunately, much of the research doesn't make that distinction. So we'll tell you when we're talking about

documented or undocumented. Otherwise, we're just talking about all immigrants. Okay, on with the show. So if you want to find out using science how immigrants affect a nation or a state or a town, one way you can do that is to look at places that got rid of a whole lot of immigrants and you can see what happened. Beginning in 2010, a bunch of US states started passing laws that made life hard for immigrants. The goal? To get undocumented people to pick up and leave. One of the strictest laws came from Alabama

and it was named Adios Bad Hombres. No, of course it wasn't. It was called the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act. And when it came into effect, police were required to verify people's immigration status during routine stops. Schools needed to find out the immigration status of children and their parents, and Americans were prohibited from hiring, renting housing to, and even giving rides to undocumented immigrants. Since the law was passed, it has been weakened quite a bit by the courts. But still, it was strong enough to scare off quite a lot of immigrants.

Now, nobody has collected specific data on how many people in total left the state after the law was passed. But estimates using census data and the Pew Research Center suggest that perhaps some 15,000 immigrants left. Another estimate out of the University of Alabama pegged the number at above 40,000. Let's be conservative and say thousands of immigrants left the state. Speaking of conservative, some politicians were excited about all of these people leaving. Here's Scott Beeson, who was then an Alabama state senator, speaking at a rally not long after the law was passed. It is doing what it is supposed to do. It is putting Alabamians back to work. It is putting Alabamians first, which is the way it should be. And it is supposed to do. It is putting Alabamians back to work. It is putting Alabamians first,

which is the way it should be. And it is saving taxpayers untold dollars. But is it? What really happens when an economy is stripped of its outsiders, when thousands of immigrants pack up and leave? Do Americans get their jobs back? We're heading to Alabama to find out. Welcome to Birmingham. Local time here is about 12.47 Central Time. From Birmingham Airport, I drove to the tiny agricultural town of Cullman with our producer, Heather Rogers.

We saw tractors, horses and some cows. What did you do? Did you provoke the cow? I didn't. They were provoking each other. It was like the best interview I've ever done. We were heading to meet farmer Jeremy Calvert, who for years has employed mostly immigrants on his fruit and veggie farm. Jeremy's crops grow in the rolling hills just outside of Cullman. His family has farmed here for six generations and he loves it. There's no smell like a load of strawberries. When the weather's been dry and the berries are producing good, but the only way I know that anybody can experience that is

they've got to be right there at that right exact moment because you can't bottle it up and sell it. Jeremy's got 30 acres, and in summer, when his peach trees are heavy with fruit, he sweats over growing the perfect peach. Nobody wants a little peach. They all have to be big and pretty, you know. Well, that means every limb on every tree has to be gone over

and it takes time and it takes hands to do it. To get those hands, Jeremy pays $10 an hour for workers and for at least the last decade, he's mostly hired workers from Mexico and Central America. But after Alabama's immigration law was passed, he says those workers, who he calls Spanish, became harder to find. We noticed over a period of months and maybe a year or so

you just don't see as many Spanish folks as you once did. And to Jeremy, the promise from politicians that losing immigrants would open up jobs for Americans didn't really pan out. He didn't get American workers in their place. And without the help, Jeremy had to pick up the slack, often working 18-hour days. When you own the operation and the job doesn't get done,

the burden falls on one person, and that's me. Now, studies haven't been done in Alabama to see the effect of the law on farmers, but a survey done in Georgia, which is right next door, found that after a very similar law was passed, farms only had about 60% of the workers that they needed. And this is the sort of thing that Sam Addy, an economist at the University of Alabama, has been studying for years. Those jobs and what they pay most unemployed people in the US will not take those jobs.

Now you might have noticed, Sam has an accent. Yes, I am from a small country in West Africa called Ghana. But Sam has lived in Alabama for nearly 20 years, and he was one of the economists who warned the state when Alabama's immigration law was passed that there might be a negative impact on farmers like Jeremy. Immigrants typically go for the jobs that we shun. So the only way you can have people fill those jobs is to bring them in. Bring the immigrants in. Sam points to a study from a few

states over in North Carolina that found that in 2011, in the wake of the recession, there were almost half a million unemployed North Carolinians. But when farmers advertised for more than 6,000 job openings, only seven American workers took those jobs and finished out the season. Yes, seven. And the rest of the jobs? They were filled by immigrants. and finished out the season. Yes, seven. And the rest of the jobs? They were filled by immigrants.

So why aren't Americans running for this work? Well, Jeremy says that he actually used to have a lot of American workers, what he calls white workers, on his farm. That is, until the late 90s. We could still get your average white person then, but you move forward to the 2000s and that's just not there anymore. And the data bears some of this out. In 1990, immigrants made up just 7.5% of men working on farms. By 2012, that number had more than tripled. But it's not entirely clear why these days Americans don't want to work on farms.

Sam from the University of Alabama says that it's partly because Americans have become more educated. More and more Americans are finishing high school and going to college. So now, for the most part, they want to get better jobs and they don't want to work on farms. Jeremy hears this kind of thing around Cullman. Americans typically don't like agriculture. They view it as a lowly position. And it's not only that farm work is seen as a step down. It's that the physical labour is really

tough. We heard this from researchers as well as farmers like Jeremy. He's had high school football players give it a go, and they struggled. The ones that did make it would come back and tell me, this is the hardest thing I've ever done. To run and work out on a football field in the heat of the day is one thing, but to bend your back and pick squash or pick tomatoes all day long in the rain and the heat and the cold, that's a different matter. What did they say?

They said, I believe if I can do this, I can do anything. And then they said, and I can't do this. Well, we have had some that would stick with us, some because we knew their parents too well and they were ashamed to quit. Unfortunately for farmers like Jeremy, there just aren't enough embarrassed high school football players or other Americans to keep all of Alabama's farms running smoothly.

A final reason why Americans might not be picking up the slack, according to research, is because immigrants are more willing to relocate for work, while Americans perhaps aren't so keen to uproot themselves and their families for, say, a job in a rural town. We tried to talk to immigrant farm workers while we were in Alabama, but no-one would go on tape. They were all skittish and they said that because of the Alabama law,

they didn't want to draw attention to themselves. Conclusion. For a bunch of reasons, Americans aren't taking certain draw attention to themselves. Conclusion. For a bunch of reasons, Americans aren't taking certain jobs, like farming. And here, immigrants fill the gaps. In those situations, immigrants are not stealing American jobs. But not all Americans are getting more educated. And the ones who aren't, they still need jobs.

So what happens when less educated Americans compete with immigrants for the same jobs? For this question, we spoke to Jenny Hunt, an economics professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey. And she too has an accent. So how many passports do you have? I have three passports. I have Australian, which is the one I originally had,

and then I became American before I went to Canada, then I became Canadian. Jenny helped write a major report in 2016 by the National Academy of Sciences on the economic effects of immigrants. It's over 500 pages long, very comprehensive. And it found that, yeah, sometimes when immigrants compete with Americans

for work, immigrants get those jobs. But other times, they don't. And FYI, Jenny calls Americans native-born. There'll be winners and losers amongst the native-born. Because when people are vying for the same job, when there's competition, it can lower wages. But not all Americans are competing with immigrants. It's all based on the skills and education of the people who are coming to America. Immigrants tend to be either very highly educated or very poorly educated, much more so than the natives. For example, if you're a native-born high school graduate,

you're actually not competing that much with immigrants. There actually aren't that many immigrants with exactly high school. So high school dropouts compete with high school dropouts and people with PhDs compete with each other. You can think about it like this. When a prince comes to America, he's not competing with a McDonald's worker. Well, except for incoming to America. I have recently been placed in charge of garbage. Do you have any that requires disposal?

And while highly educated Americans can compete with immigrants for jobs, most research shows that people who didn't finish high school are the ones that feel the biggest brunt from immigrants. They're the biggest losers when it comes to immigration. We did come to the consensus also in the report that there is a negative effect of immigration on very unskilled groups of native-born workers. And Jenny says while this can be tough for people losing money each week...

It is useful to remember that only 10% of natives are high school dropouts these days and that's shrinking all the time. In fact, she rechecked the numbers and found that it's actually only 8% of America's population. So it's small, but it's not nothing. It is more people than live in the entire state of New York. But, and this is really important, how much pay do these people actually lose?

Because there are reports in the news that some immigrants are having a devastating impact on the wages of some Americans. Are they? Well, this all depends on how you slice up the data, because you've really got to do some careful analysis here. Economists have to separate the effect of immigration from other changes in the market, and so the studies vary. They've found that immigrants can drive down wages by 9% to 4% to 3% all the way down to 0.7%. Put it all together and the National Academy of Sciences report says that the impact of immigration on the wages of Americans overall in the long run is, quote-unquote, very small.

And here's the thing. Even with that 8% of high school dropouts, Americans still aren't necessarily losing jobs because while there might be more competition, and yes, an immigrant may be hired over an American, those high school dropouts, that 8%, they can actually find new work. I asked Jenny about this. I said, so say you meet someone and they're saying there's immigrants coming in, taking out jobs. What would you tell them?

Well, so I'd have good news and bad news to tell them. One is that they probably would still be employed because again, in the US US there's really no evidence. Nobody thinks the employment rate is lowered by immigrants. And so in the pub, he would probably be telling me about his new job. The bad news is that his new job wouldn't be a very good job. And if he was a high school dropout, his wages may indeed have fallen. OK, so this raises the obvious question. If there are more people and more competition,

why aren't more Americans out of a job? Well, there's something else that immigrants do when they come to a country. They create jobs. Here's how it works. When new people come to the US, they buy food, gasoline, clothes, they rent apartments, they get haircuts, just like in that immigration documentary with Eddie Murphy.

Tell me how you want me to cut this. Just to make it nice and neat. And all that spending creates jobs for people who work in those businesses where immigrants spend their money. That'll be $8. And because of this, back in Alabama, when thousands of undocumented immigrants left, Sam Addy, from the University of Alabama, was worried.

The biggest thing that stared me in the face was the fact that, holy smokes, don't we realize that for every single one of them who leaves, we have less people buying stuff at our grocery stores? And this is true of any immigrant, documented or not. Yes, they are illegal, but their demand is real. And he says that demand, all that spending, all those new people who want stuff, doesn't just create jobs in restaurants and barbershops, but it actually creates a cascade of new jobs. Doctors need patients, patients.

But guess what? There has to be pharmacies on the side, roads to the pharmacies. So now we need civil engineers and builders and draftsmen and architects. So you can keep going on and on. And when do we get to where we need economists? You need them all along the line. Let me make a point. And how do we know this?

Back in 1980, this idea that growing demand creates jobs was put to the ultimate test. Around 120,000 immigrants fled Cuba on boats and landed in Florida over six months, most of them headed to Miami. And this event is known as the Marielle Boat Lift. It's named after a Cuban harbour, Marielle, where the immigrants boarded on the boats that then lifted them out of Cuba.

Between midnight and noon today, 23 boats reached Key West, Florida. So what happened to the employment rate of Americans in Miami when tens of thousands of immigrants landed there? Well, there was, quote, virtually no effect, end quote. That's according to one analysis of the boat lift and other academic papers have found the same thing. This is because the economy of Miami expanded

to give these people work and all of this new demand created more jobs for immigrants as well as Americans. In other words, there isn't just a fixed number of jobs. The more people there are, the more demand there is, the more jobs there are. And this idea is so well established that when our producer,

Heather Rogers, spoke to Sam about it, this is what he had to say. What do you say to people who think that there are a finite number of jobs? I tell them it's hogwash. But so long as population is increasing or decreasing, there's no finite number of jobs because you're changing demand all the time. And this demand doesn't just create jobs. It also fills government purses because they get more money in sales and property taxes. Sam says that by icing out

undocumented workers, his state ultimately lost out. Since the law was passed, the population has grown at a much slower rate, he says, than it otherwise would have. And to Sam, this slower population growth means less people in Alabama to buy stuff and less taxes for the state. I think we shut ourselves in the foot and so we haven't been able to grow as much as we could have. So how do you know that that gap in the growth, how do you know that that's because of the law? Because there is no other economic factor to explain that slow growth. And there is a particular group of immigrants, the most highly educated immigrants, that create jobs by doing more than just buying stuff.

They innovate. And the way that economists track innovation is by keeping tabs on the number of TED Talks that immigrants do, because economists and everyone else agrees that TED Talks are the number one measure of innovation. Not really. TEDxBendigo, are you kidding me? Seriously, though. To track innovation, Jenny Hunt at Rutgers University looks at patents. And skilled immigrants get proportionally more of them than Americans. And these are inventions that companies actually go on to use,

which, according to Jenny, juices the economy across the board. The benefit is spread over everyone, including the low-skilled native-born workers. And we actually think that innovation not only raises wages, but it actually raises growth. The National Academy of Sciences report went so far as to say that the United States' prospect for long-term economic growth, quote, would be considerably dimmed without the contributions of high-skilled immigrants, end quote. Conclusion. For some people, particularly high school dropouts, immigrants can lower your wages. Still, they're not going to run you out of a job because they help to create new jobs.

OK, so immigrants give by helping the economy to grow and doing jobs that Americans don't want to do. But how much do they take? And do they drive up the crime rate? That's coming up after the break. All right, so we've just learned that immigrants give to the economy and tend to do the jobs that Americans don't want to do. But immigrants, they also take. The biggest beneficiaries of immigration are the immigrants themselves. Coming to America lets them tap into resources like jobs that can help lift them out of poverty. They can also get public education, Medicaid, food assistance and subsidised

housing. According to that National Academy of Sciences report, the one that was 500 pages, documented immigrant households are more likely to be getting some type of welfare than American households. And that could be why some 40% of Americans view immigrants as a drain on social services. Plus, immigrants tend to have more kids than Americans, and those kids can all go to public schools and get a free education. Add all these things up and immigrants are more kids than Americans, and those kids can all go to public schools and get a free education. Add all these things up, and immigrants are more expensive than Americans on average.

Just focusing on documented immigrants for a second, while they do pay taxes, overall, they still cost money. The government spends around $5,000 per year on each immigrant, including their kids. And this equation looks even worse when you include undocumented immigrants, those who don't pay income tax. Now, some undocumented workers actually do pay tax because they use other people's social security numbers.

But many don't. But once again, it's all about how you slice up the numbers. When economists figure out how much immigrants cost when they're documented or undocumented, they often charge immigrants for the cost of educating their kids. And Sam Addy at the University of Alabama says this can be misleading. When you are looking at the education and you start attributing all the education costs

only to the parent, it's a flawed analysis. The reason for that is education has spillovers to everybody. He gave us an example. Say someone, let's call her Wendy Druckerman, goes to school, gets an education and then starts working. She brings skills to that job that maybe her co-workers don't have. Say, Sam's one of her co-workers. I benefit from it right away because I see how she does her work and I learn how I do my work that way.

Or perhaps she uses her education to go to college. You know, she's going to learn and she's making big bucks. Guess what? She can tip the waiter better. The waiter gets a better quality of life. Or if Wendy Druckerman is a cheapskate, she doesn't tip waiters. She still pays more tax. In fact, that hefty National Academy of Sciences report found that while immigrants might take, the American-born children of immigrants contribute more in federal, state and local taxes than Americans who have been here for multiple generations. These children of immigrants straight up just earn more money and so they pay more taxes than other Americans. Their bottom line analysis is that immigration is good for the country.

That is their bottom line. When you read it, you'll see it very clearly. Yes, when the National Academy of Sciences report added it all up that immigrants compete with some workers, help out other workers, lower some wages, boost other wages. Ultimately, they found that, quote, immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the United States, end quote. Conclusion. Overall, immigrants do take, and they take a lot. But some of what they take is for their kids. And over time, those kiddos boost the American economy

and pay a whole lot of taxes. Final question. Immigrants might, on average, boost the US economy, but what about the crime rates? Are they boosting those too? President Donald Trump seems to think so. on average boost the US economy. But what about the crime rates? Are they boosting those too? President Donald Trump seems to think so. Here he is speaking during the election. The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else's problems.

When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you. They're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems. And they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists.

And some, I assume assume are good people. And now that he's president, Donald Trump is still very much focused on the crimes that immigrants commit. And the idea that immigrants come to America and commit a lot of crimes is something that we heard in Alabama too. While we were in Cullman, Heather and I wandered into a small but packed two-chair barbershop. Hey, hello girls. Heather and I wandered into a small but packed two-chair barbershop. Hey. Hello, girls. Where a man named Charlie Heaton has been cutting hair for decades.

He knows just about everyone in town, even our farmer. Yes, I know Jeremy Calvert. So we had a chat. He comes in here. Oh, the young boy? Yeah, Jeremy. What kind of haircut does he get? Regular. He gets a regular forming haircut.

There you go. The guy sitting in Charlie's chair is a heavyset cattle farmer with a chin for days. And as he told Heather, he's not a fan of the Mexicans in his area. Yeah. Hey, them Mexicans ain't like everybody thinks they are. What are they like? What are they like?

Well, them cheating lions and all that. Are all Mexicans like them? No they like? Well, them cheating, lying sons of guns. Are all Mexicans like them? No, no, no, no, no. They might be a few good'uns, but there ain't too many good'uns. I know some good'uns. I really do. Charlie, our barber, with the regular-sized chin, was worried about the immigrants bringing in drugs. The Mexicans, they sell and buy drugs a lot more.

The idea that immigrants bring crime is pretty common. Surveys suggest that a third of Americans think that any immigrant who comes to the U.S. increases crime. And when you ask specifically about undocumented immigrants, more than half of Americans think they drive up crime. So, is this true? Well, it's actually incredibly difficult to divvy up the crime stats in America between documented and undocumented immigrants because the authorities don't publicly release data on the immigration status of convicted criminals.

And when it comes to immigrants and drug crime, that's Charlie's biggest gripe, it's not easy to decipher that either. But there are two big sources of data that we can look at. First, the FBI. Their drug-related crime data is patchy. And one researcher we contacted who had dug into that patchy data found no clear effect of immigration on drug crimes.

The second place we could get this information from is prisons to see how many criminals inside them are immigrants and how many aren't. Again though, there's very little data to work with. We did find one paper using prison data from 1986 which showed that immigrants on average were incarcerated for more drug crimes than the general population. But the researchers gave many caveats. Among them, they wrote that it was impossible to know whether or not the people who were arrested were actual immigrants or just professional drug smugglers who never intended to immigrate.

So, until there's more research, we can't go much further with the question of drug crimes. Now, there is more research when it comes to property and violent crimes. So let's check these out. And to do that, we're going to head over to another place in the world that is also worried about this stuff and where there's some great research. The UK. Last year, concerns about foreigners reached fever pitch in the UK during the lead-up to the Brexit vote,

when campaigners were yelling that immigrants jack up crime. This is Nigel Farage, a key player in the pro-Brexit campaign. Whether it's burglary or sexual assaults, it's very difficult for us to stop people with criminal records coming into Britain. And certainly, once they're in Britain, it's almost impossible to stop them residing here. Brian Bell, an economist at King's College London, has looked into this. And Brian, he's more British than a cheeky Nando's. His family has lived in England for a very long time. We've always lived in Britain. I think we've been here since 1066. Wow. So did one

of your ancestors colonise Australia or were they sent as a convict to Australia? I'm sure we didn't have any convicts in our family. Brian recently studied how two large immigrant waves to the UK affected crime. The first were mainly asylum seekers who came in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They came from Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and the former Yugoslavia. A second wave of foreigners came from the European Union. Mainly Polish, some Hungarians, Latvians, Lithuanians, so all of the East European countries that joined the European Union in 2004. Brian looked at how these waves of immigrants affected violent crime rates, that is, murder, assault, rape, as well as property crimes, breaking into houses, stealing cars and shoplifting.

He said that when it came to violent crimes, immigrants had no effect. And this is consistent with other work in the field. None of these immigrant groups and none of the immigrant groups that I've seen across any study that's been done suggests any effect on violent crime. But what about property crime? Well, when the Eastern Europeans came, there was no effect. At the margin, in fact, it looks like they reduced crime in areas they went to. There was certainly no increase.

But for the asylum seekers, that first wave? What we found was there was some small increase in property crime in areas where they went to. And how big was the increase in property crime when you look at the refugees that came? So it was a really small effect. Ultimately, he found that if you had a town of 10,000 people and 100 asylum seekers moved there, the property crime rate would increase by 1.1%. Realistically, if you lived in an area

where there were a collection of asylum seekers, you wouldn't have noticed any change in the crime rate. Now, Brian has a theory for why there was a difference between asylum seekers and the other immigrants. And that is that asylum seekers who came to the UK couldn't work while their applications for asylum were under review, while immigrants from the European Union,

they could work. And, you know, people who have jobs tend not to commit property crime because they've worked out that working legally is a better deal than committing crime. And Brian says that other studies have reached the same conclusion. A study that was done in Italy using a very similar kind of approach that we did, and a study in the United States that did, again, a very similar kind of approach.

Both of those studies found that, on average, there was very little effect of immigrants on crime. The growing consensus here is that when immigrants arrive to a country with the right to work, they don't increase the crime rate. In fact, they may even lower it. Among the many papers we read that found this, one paper said no matter where immigrants to the US come from, they are, quote,

less likely to engage in violent or non-violent antisocial behaviours than native-born Americans, end quote. I asked Brian about the disconnect between public perceptions and scientific findings. Why do you think that people are so sure that immigrants are causing crime when the evidence isn't there to show it? In some sense, you could argue it's because we're asking different questions. What academics are asking is what's the average effect? That's different from asking a question of, oh, if 10 new immigrants arrive in my town, does that mean I'm definitely not going to see an increase in crime? Well, no, it doesn't. Because just like if 10 new natives arrived in your town, they might be bad people and they might commit crime.

And what about Alabama? What happened to the crime when the immigrants here left? Last year, researchers from Texas A&M University tracked the crime rates in Alabama from before and after the law kicked in. And they found that when the immigrants left, the violent crime rate rose and the property crime rate, it stayed about the same.

I put our research to Charlie over at the barbershop in Cullman as he gave his farmer a regular farming haircut. We've been looking at some of, like, the data, like, the science, the studies on, like, crime rates and, like, who's causing more crime. No, I don't know that about that. Yeah, but interestingly, it interestingly, it tends to find that immigrants who come to America do less crime, have a lower crime rate than Americans.

Is that what that's surprising? I don't know. I can see what you're saying because if they commit crime, they're going to draw attention to their self and they'll get deported. I can see that statistic being right. In 2014, researchers studying why immigrants commit less crime on average wrote quote, one simple explanation is that immigrants have a lot to lose, including deportation

and avoiding law enforcement is an especially good idea Interestingly though, while immigrants have a lower crime rate on average than Americans, it seems that the children of immigrants are significantly more likely to be involved in crime than their parents. And there are all sorts of reasons as to why this might be. Are the kids of immigrants caught between the old world and the new world? Are they angry and frustrated? Or are they just becoming like the Americans around them? Here's Sam Addy from the University of Alabama. So the crime rate of immigrants is lower like the Americans around them. Here's Sam Addy from the University of Alabama.

So the crime rate of immigrants is lower than the rest of the population. But when you get to the second and third generations, they become like the rest of us. And why is that? They've assimilated. Yes, they assimilate. And then they're just as likely to commit crimes as any other American. Not more, not less.

Conclusion. While there might be a slight bump in property crime rates when immigrants come without the right to work, new immigrants commit fewer crimes on average property crime rates when immigrants come without the right to work. New immigrants commit fewer crimes on average than people who were born in the US. So when it comes to science versus immigration, do the fears stack up? First, are immigrants taking American jobs? For the most part, no. Immigrants are not running people out of work

because when they come to America, they bring new demand and that creates jobs. Second, do immigrants lower wages? Well, some groups, specifically those without a high school education, may see a wage drop. Now, while the consensus is that their wages aren't dropping by very much, living on minimum wage in the US is hard enough as it is,

so any drop can have an impact. But still, on average, for the whole country, immigrants don't affect wages. Third, are they taking more from the American government than they give? Well, immigrants cost more than Americans do, but their kids, they give more than other Americans do. So spending on immigrants isn't really a drain. It's more like an investment.

And finally, what about crime? Well, immigrants who come without the right to work might boost the property crime rate, but not by much. And otherwise, if they are allowed to work, immigrants do not affect the crime rate, and in fact, might even lower it. With clear evidence showing that immigrants don't wreck the job market for Americans or drain public funds or commit lots of crimes, why all the hollering about getting rid of them? Well, one explanation is that as Americans have lost higher-paying jobs and as they struggle to stay in the middle class,

they look around and see people who don't look or speak like them. And then they fall into this pattern that scientists have seen over and over again. People very, very naturally build groups and they identify insiders and outsiders. Dan Hopkins is a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. Extensive research shows that people, even with very, very minimal groups, can immediately start to favor the in-group and to dislike the out-group. And these groups can be about practically anything. Americans and non-Americans, deplorables and non-deplorables, whites and non-whites.

And that this tendency to create in-groups and out-groups is almost baked into the human psyche. It creates an opening for people trying to push an agenda because it's just such an easy button to push. Yeah, exactly. There is an existing set of sentiments that can quite readily be tapped into. But curiously, while we humans do have a tendency to pop people into groups, most Americans actually aren't necessarily putting immigrants into the get out of my country group. A 2016 survey from Pew found that 60% of Americans see immigrants as a strength rather than as a burden to the US.

And that is at its highest level in more than 20 years. So despite what we keep hearing about and reading about in the news, we're closer than you'd think to accepting the science on immigration. And that is that overall, people who come to the US from other countries ultimately make their new home a more prosperous place. That's science versus immigration. This episode has been produced by Heather Rogers, Shruti Ravindran and me. Caitlin Sawry is our senior producer. Production assistance by Ben Kebrick. We're edited by Annie Rose Strasser. Fact

checking by Michelle Harris. Sound engineering, music production and original music written by Bobby Lord. Thanks to Dr Anna Phil Dam, Professor Charisse Kubrin, Assistant Professor George Spenkuch, Professor Kristen Butcher and Ramiro Martinez, as well

as the Zuckerman family. Thanks for your help. And just before you go, we have a little challenge for you. In the next week, we want you to grab the phone of a friend and subscribe them to Science Versus. Like, actually just get their phone, show them the podcast app and subscribe them to Science Versus. Like, actually just get their phone, show them the podcast app, and subscribe them to Science Versus. You can subscribe one friend or three or ten,

and we will be very happy. That's the prize you get. You've made us happy. Thanks, guys. Next up on your feed, it's Science Versus Acne. And next week, we tackle climate change. How bad is this really going to get? Sometimes you feel like there's a buzzard of doom

sitting on everyone's shoulder. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.