Trump to visit Prairie du Chien, highlight immigration

Former President Donald Trump is coming to Prairie du Chien this Saturday, where he is expected to speak about the border and immigration.

Prairie du Chien is a small city of around 5,000 people on the border of Iowa. Earlier this month, Prairie du Chien police arrested an undocumented Venezuelan immigrant gang member for allegedly assaulting a woman and her daughter. Police called it a ‘targeted attack.’

Now Republicans like Rep. Derrick Van Orden and Senate Candidate Eric Hovde have turned to Fox News, highlighting immigration as a key issue for the battleground state.

To learn more about the correlation between undocumented immigrants and crime, WMTV 15′s Wisconsin State Capitol Bureau Chief sat down with UW-Madison Professor Michael Light, whose research on the intersection of undocumented immigrants and crime has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Below is a Q-and-A that has been edited for brevity and clarity:

Vanessa Kjeldsen: What do we know about, statistically speaking, undocumented immigrants and the likelihood of committing crime?

Michael Light: Undocumented immigrants have a very strong incentive to not commit crime, right? Any, you know, sort of run-in with the law is [potential to be] deported...Basically across the board, undocumented immigrants in Texas have lower rates of criminality, and this is true whether we look at arrests, this is true whether we look at misdemeanor arrests, this is true whether we look at convictions.

Kjeldsen: How much lower?

Light: We found that for violent crimes, undocumented immigrants are two times less likely to be arrested for a violent crime. For property crimes, about four times less likely. For drugs, I want to say its somewhere in between the two.

Kjeldsen: When you hear of the case in Prairie du Chien of the Venezuelan undocumented immigrant with alleged gang ties. I mean, what’s your reaction when you hear a story like that that instantly gets picked up and is on all of the airwaves?

Light: Part of the reason why those stories tend to make national news is, I think because it generates this sort of additional, sort of aggravating factor of somebody who wasn’t supposed to be here in the first place is now victimizing community members, and that that resonates with people in different way.

Vanessa: What do people get wrong about undocumented immigrants and crime?

Light: Well I think just the general association that undocumented immigration necessarily increases the violent rate of crime.... If the argument is that undocumented immigrants have committed crimes, then yes, of course they have. That’s just, that’s unambiguous. But if the argument is that when undocumented immigrants come to the United States, that they increase this sort of level of risk of victimization to the broader public, there’s very little evidence to suggest that’s true.

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