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JR

Jason Richwine

Series

Parsing Immigration Policy3 episodes

Recent Episodes

Parsing Immigration Policy
Parsing Immigration Policy

Flawed Studies Misuse Texas Crime Data Resulting in False Claims about Illegal Alien Crime

Summary Academics and activists have been misusing data from the Texas Department of Public Safety to claim that illegal immigrants have lower rates of crime than the native-born or legal immigrants. On this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jason Richwine, and co-author of the recent report, Misuse of Texas Data Understates Illegal Immigrant Criminality, discusses the flawed research, which has been relied upon by activists, media, and even litigators to claim lower rates of crime among illegal immigrants and to support unlimited illegal immigration. The Center’s report reveals that while strong claims about the overall criminality of illegal immigrants are not possible with current data, prior research has understated it substantially by ignoring or downplaying that the immigration status of many arrestees and convicts is unknown at the time of arrest, resulting in an undercount in the data. Over time, illegal immigrants move from the “other/unknown” category to the “illegal” category as their status is determined.
Host:
Mark Krikorian
Organization
Center for Immigration Studies

July 2022

Parsing Immigration Policy
Parsing Immigration Policy

Is There a Scholarly Consensus that Immigration Benefits All Americans?

View Podcast Archive Summary The costs and benefits of immigration are routinely measured and debated in academic journals with the conclusion that immigration has mixed effects. That conclusion comports with most people's common-sense understanding of the issue. Nevertheless, many advocacy groups continue to cite a supposed academic "consensus" that immigration has only benefits. In this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jason Richwine, the Center’s resident scholar, discusses his recently updated compendium of academic work showing negative impacts of immigration. Starting with a 2016 review by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Richwine summarizes some of the published papers, authored by mainstream academics writing for mainstream outlets, that have found both costs and benefits. The papers, which look at wage and employment, political and cultural, and crime and health effects, support Richwine’s assessment that immigration creates both winners and losers. “One-sided claims about immigration are rarely true.
Host:
Mark Krikorian
Organization
Center for Immigration Studies

July 2021

Parsing Immigration Policy
Parsing Immigration Policy

Evidence That Immigrants Reduce Wages and Job Opportunities for Low-Skill Americans

Summary Despite attempts by advocates to downplay the evidence that immigration hurts U.S. workers, the empirical evidence is overwhelming. In this week’s episode of Parsing Immigration Policy, Jason Richwine, a Resident Scholar at the Center, highlights Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) cases in which a clear pattern of discrimination against U.S. workers emerges. Dr. Richwine and Mark Krikorian, the Center’s executive director and host of the podcast, discuss how this qualitative evidence complements the quantitative studies that have found similar impacts. They lament that D.C. journalists – and even some activist academics – seem more interested in pro-immigration talking points than they are in fair summaries of the literature. In his Closing Commentary, Krikorian notes that the old “wet foot/dry foot” policy for Cuban illegal immigrants may be making a comeback in a different form. DHS Secretary Mayorkas announced this week that migrants fleeing unrest in Cuba and Haiti will be turned away – but only if they are caught at sea.
Host:
Mark Krikorian
Organization
Center for Immigration Studies