Scott Alexander

Who mostly didn't enter as asylum seekers, but through a different refugee resettlement pathway.

In some sense, this is a boring difference.

Who cares exactly which legal pathway immigrants from failed states use to get into the country?

But in another sense, it's exactly what I'm arguing.

Despite there being no relevant difference between these terms, we're using the incorrect European ones, because we're having the European debate.

So US asylum seekers as a category probably have a lower crime rate than natives.

No perfectly applicable statistics, but I think the evidence suggests about half, and ChatGPT thinks it suggests 0.3 to 0.7 times.

Why then do Dilbert readers nod along with the idea of three people per workday getting stabbed by asylum seekers?

In Germany, asylum seekers seem to commit murder at about eight times the native rate.

This has naturally caught the attention of many Germans, and the German and broader European discussion about the issue has made its way back across the Atlantic and influenced US opinion of asylum seekers as a group.

Footnote.

Why should these numbers be so different in the US versus Germany?

Partly because differing geography and history expose them to different immigrant groups, partly because differing legal systems mean they select immigrants differently, partly because different culture makes it easier for immigrants to integrate into America, and partly because native-born Americans have a higher crime rate than native-born Germans, so the same immigrant crime rate can be lower than Americans but higher than Germans.

Back to the text Unfortunately, nobody has an incentive to think about this Conservatives don't want to think about it because it undermines their anti-immigrant talking points

But liberals also don't want to think about it, both because it feels problematic to admit that American anti-immigrant populists might have a point, and because they don't like touching crime statistics for purely domestic reasons.

Both sides covertly cooperate in treating the West, in quotes, as a monolithic entity.

Still, I think this plays into the conservatives' hands.

They can tell scary stories about immigrants in Europe, always hinting that they apply to America too.

American liberals either ignore them or call them problematic, giving the conservatives a second victory.

They can paint intellectuals as mealy-mouthed and unwilling to acknowledge reality.