Scott Alexander

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More likely, it's selection.

The Afghans are mostly translators and local guides getting persecuted by the Taliban for helping American occupation forces.

The Chinese and Venezuelans are mostly well-off people fleeing communism.

What about the very poorest groups from the most dysfunctional countries?

Taken literally, the numbers suggest that Somalis and Haitians both have lower incarceration rates than US natives.

Matthew Lilly and Robert Verbruggen make the newness objection.

The very newest immigrants have had less time to commit crimes, and here it has more teeth given the smaller gaps.

When you adjust for it, Somalis commit crimes at about two times native rates, and Haitians at about one times.

Although nobody has actually done this adjustment with the Haitian statistics, and this number is eyeballed only.

Footnote.

Eyeballing technique.

Somalis appeared to have about one times the native crime rate, but after Lilly slash Verbruggen's adjustment, they had about two times.

So the adjustment seems to double the raw numbers.

Haitians started with 0.6 times native crime rate, so this would double to 1.2 times.

But Haitians have been in the US longer than Somalis on average, so we should expect this effect to be smaller, so I round it down to one times.

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So the only group where I can find clear evidence for a higher than native crime rate is in Somalis.

Footnote, there is unclear suggestive evidence for Hondurans, although this doesn't extend even to other Central American groups.

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