Scott Alexander

For example, in my research on Scott Adams, I came across the following Dilbert strip, which is apparently supposed to take place in the US.

Here's a cartoon showing Dilbert Reborn.

It's from January 25, 2024.

It shows the pointy-haired boss saying, what's the casualty report for today?

And the animal replies, three employees were stabbed by Elbonian asylum seekers on the way to work, and one was clubbed to death in a cubicle.

The boss sips from coffee and says, any other issues?

Police are running low on chalk.

Scott writes, There are no good statistics on asylum seeker crime per se in America, but we know that the most common countries of origin for seekers are Afghanistan, China and Venezuela.

Afghans are incarcerated at one-tenth the average US rate, Chinese at one-twentieth and Venezuelans at one-quarter, one-fourth.

Footnote, these statistics are hard to find and I am mixing the rate for all Afghan Americans with the rate for specifically foreign-born Venezuelans and Chinese.

I assume that most Afghan Americans are first- or second-generation immigrants, and this shouldn't affect numbers much.

Back to the text.

These statistics may be biased downward by some immigrants being too new to have gotten incarcerated, but this probably can't explain the whole effect.

Footnote.

See paragraph below for further discussion of this.

In one analysis, this approximately doubled the immigrant-to-native criminality ratio, although this estimate will depend a lot on how new immigration from the relevant country is.

Various other biases.

Sometimes criminal immigrants are deported instead of being incarcerated.

Sometimes immigrants are incarcerated for immigration-related offenses.

I don't think any of these, or all of them together, are enough to let us dismiss the effect.