Back in anthropology class, we talked rather extensively about ethics–specifically, What if you write things that hurt the people you’re studying?
Take the Yanomami (also spelled Yanomamo, not to be confused with the Yamnaya.) While there is some dispute over why the Yanomami are violent, and they probably aren’t the most violent people on Earth, they certainly commit their fair share of violence:
In 1967, anthropologist Napoleon Alphonseau Chagnon published Yanomamö: The Fierce People, which quickly became a bestseller, both for anthropology students and the popular public. On the less scholarly side, Ruggero Deodato released the horror film “Cannibal Holocaust” in 1980, fictional account of Yanomami cannibalism. I have truly never understood the interest in or psychology behind the horror genre, but apparently the film has been banned in 50 countries and highly regarded by people who like that sort of thing–Total Film ranked it the tenth greatest horror film of all time, Wired included it in its list of the top 25 horror films, and IGN ranked it 8th on its list of the ten greatest grindhouse films–so I assume that means it was very horrific and very popular.
Aside from allegations that the anthropologists themselves gave/traded the Yanomami a bunch of weapons that resulted in a big increase in the number of deaths, there are claims that, due to the Yanomamis’ violent reputation, miners in the area have opted to just shoot them on sight. The Yanomami are a rather small, isolated people with no political power to speak of, little immunity to Western diseases, and a lot of negative interactions with miners.
In a more mundane example, an anthropologist I spoke with referred to widespread illegal drug use among a people they had lived with. No one wants to cause legal trouble for their friends/companions/hosts–getting people arrested after they opened their homes and lives to you would be really shitty. But the behavior remains. None of us is perfect; every group does things that other people disapprove of or that would not look so great if someone wrote it down and published it.
The Thumper approach–that most favored by Americans, I suspect–is to just try not to say anything that might be perceived as not-nice. Report all of the good, and just leave out the bad.
My inner Kantian insists that this is lying, and that lying is bad. Maybe I can gloss over illegal drug use, but if I write a book about the Yanomami and don’t mention violence, I am a baldfaced liar, and you, my reader, should be mad at me for deceiving you. If I am in the business of describing humans and fail to do so, then like a stool with two legs, I am not doing my job.
The other solution I see people employ is to dress up all of the potentially negative things in dry, technical language so that normal people don’t notice. This would be the opposite of making a movie like Cannibal Holocaust. We use terms like “genetic introgression” and “affective empathy” and “clades,” which people who don’t generally read technical materials on the subject tend not to be familiar with.
But there are times when there are no two ways about it–there are no polite, responsible ways to disguise the truth, you don’t want to lie, and you genuinely don’t want to cause distress or trouble for anyone.
We never came up with a solution back in class. I still don’t have one.
So I was looking at this map, trying to figure out what might be causing different rates of violence:
No data for non-EU countries like Norway and Russia
Clearly it’s not degree of Germaness, as the Germans have less (reported) violence than their cousins in France, the UK, and Denmark. Doesn’t look like a Hajnal line effect, as France is solidly inside the line and Greece isn’t. Doesn’t look like latititude, is Ireland and Denmark and Latvia are all around the same latitude. Probably not an immigration thing, as it’s a stretch to blame violence against half of Denmark’s women on whatever relatively small % of the population is immigrants, while Spain and Italy (which I’m sure also have immigrants) are down in the 20%s.
Then I thought, aside from Ireland, it does look rather like a map of when grain arrived in Europe. Maybe the violence is fueled by alcohol, and groups that have been exposed to alcohol for longer are more resistant to its effects. (And Ireland, btw, does not have as much of an alcohol problem as is generally claimed.)
So here is a map of the spread of wheat in Europe:
Since grain originated (as far as Europe is concerned) in Turkey, I suspect that it became a dominant dietary staple faster after introduction in Spain, whose climate is probably similar to Turkey, than in more northerly places like Scotland or Finland. Ireland does not appear to lag significantly behind England, but northern Scotland does. Sadly, this map does not show us the Baltic and Scandinavia, where I gather the hunter-gatherer-fisher-herder lifestyle held on much longer.
This map sheds some light on why the UK comes out with more violence than Ireland: the Scottish. The English look pretty okay overall, but the Scots apparently get drunk and beat their wives with the vigor of, well, I guess the French.
I’d really like to see more complete versions of these maps, but oh, well. (Though I’m glad they left off Russia, which I suspect would change the scale on the graph, compressing the rest of the data into uselessness.)
Here are my suspicions: Grain (particularly wheat) started out over in Turkey and spread to Greece, Italy, Spain, the south-Slavic regions, southern French coast, and Germany, in about that order. These areas all seem to have low rates of domestic violence and, except for the Slavs, low rates of alcohol-fueled death. Perhaps the stats on that reflect differences in density or drunk driving laws, or the later admixture of another population like the Magyars that has less alcohol tolerance. East Germany clearly stands out as an anomaly that is probably due to the Cold War.
Wheat farming reached northern Europe later, reaching Scotland, Denmark, the Baltic, and Scandinavia last. Lower rates of alcohol-related death in some of these spots probably reflect people driving drunk less often due to local factors.
According to “investoralist”, in “The geo-alcohol belts of Europe,” “Episodic drunkenness seems embedded in the Nordic culture, so much so that most Scandinavian states have outrageously high alcohol taxes to discourage binge-drinking. In a country where alcohol is the most common cause of death among working-aged adults, Finland raised its alcohol taxes twice in the 2008-2009 period.”
He further quotes, “[W]hen Finns drink, they drink heavily. The important thing is that I believe that they are not only drinking away their cultural neurosis; they actually value the cathartic effect of Dionysian drinking. This leads to a situation where, as I have put it, you can’t single out the alcoholics at our parties because everyone is as dead-drunk as alcoholics. This leads to a cultural tradition where drunkenness is positively valued among rather large segments of the population. Therefore, there exists no cultural consensus regarding the positive effects of moderation.”
So I was reading a conversation over at HBD Chick’s the other day about why some people take her work way too personally (and confrontationally,) even though it clearly isn’t meant that way, in which someone pointed out that even if she doesn’t exactly mean it that way, if you call people clannish or tribal, they’re bound to get offended, because nobody likes clannishness.
But wait, I thought. I know people who like clannishness.
This seems obvious when you consider that the majority of people who live in societies-that-are-more-clannish-than-mine probably like their societies and prefer their level of clannishness to my society’s level, otherwise they would take steps to change their society. Even if they might balk at the words like “clannish” or “tribal” (or the insinuation that their society has higher levels of in-breeding than some other society,) there are plenty of practical aspects of clannishness that some people actually like.
In the clannish society, you can depend on your extended kin network to always have your back. Clannish societies are generally very friendly–compare the outgoing friendliness of southern Italians to the more reserved-natured Germans. People with strong kin networks are born with a supply of friends, role models, advice givers, and potential business partners. Their kinfolk will even stick up for them, defending them against outsiders.
The inverse of clannishness is atomization, and atomization is lonely and stressful. In the atomized society, you are stuck on your own, with no one to catch you if you fall. You might be a single mother or an only child, or a hikikomori. Either way, you’re alone–and most people don’t seem to cope well with loneliness.
(The downside to tribal societies is that friendly extroverts are more likely to punch you in the face.)
Several of my friends have visited or lived in societies that fall outside the Hajnal Line, and absolutely loved them. “The friendliest place I have ever been,” raved one. “The people there are so friendly, I hear they’d stop and talk to their neighbors on the way to the hospital!” said another. “I just got hit on for the first time in my life,” said a third. “The only place I have ever felt what it meant to have a loving family–if only my family were like that.” “Everyone was so hospitable and polite and absolutely mortified when my hotel got bombed.” “If it weren’t for my [obligations], I would move there in a heartbeat.” (Quotes from five different places.)
Some of these same people have gone through decades of loneliness in outbred societies. One friend had literally no friends for a decade, after losing a spouse to a divorce and a child and parent to death; two are considered unattractive and are perennially alone. Several have little to no relationship with their extended families; most live quite far from their nearest relatives.
So even if people may not like being called “clannish” or “tribal,” these societies certainly have their fans.
Sexually dimorphic facial features vary according to level of autistic-like traits in the general population.
“three-dimensional (3D) facial images were collected from 208 young adult males and females recruited from the general population. Twenty-three facial distances were measured from these images and a gender classification and scoring algorithm was employed to identify a set of six facial features that most effectively distinguished male from female faces. In study 2, measurements of these six features were compared for groups of young adults selected for high (n = 46) or low (n = 66) levels of autistic-like traits.
RESULTS:
For each sex, four of the six sexually dimorphic facial distances significantly differentiated participants with high levels of autistic-like traits from those with low trait levels. All four features were less masculinised for high-trait males compared to low-trait males. Three of four features were less feminised for high-trait females compared to low-trait females. One feature was, however, not consistent with the general pattern of findings and was more feminised among females who reported more autistic-like traits. Based on the four significantly different facial distances for each sex, discriminant function analysis correctly classified 89.7% of the males and 88.9% of the females into their respective high- and low-trait groups.”
I wonder if they controlled for family’s overall androgyny level/IQ/ethnicity.
I know it shouldn’t surprise me when people post outright, bold-faced lies about, say, the nature of humanity, but somehow I still stare in shock for a split second or two before struggling with whether or not to respond.
It’s generally a bad idea to respond, another thing you would think I’d have learned by now. No one likes the guy who starts every comment with, “Actually…”
Today’s lie was, to paraphrase slightly due to memory being imperfect, “Animals are so loving and compassionate, even to members not of their own species! Humans totally fail at compassion. We should learn from our ape cousins and ancestors!” The sentiments were accompanied by an adorable picture of an orangutan holding a baby tiger.
Okay, the exclamation points are my own additions.
First, the obvious: This shit is a baldfaced lie. If animals were regularly compassionate and loving to members of other species, lions would be vegans and running adoption agencies for baby gazelles whose parents had fallen victim to unfortunate accidents. If animals were regularly loving and compassionate, we wouldn’t make a big deal out of it every time a hippo and turtle hang out together. Does someone write a picture book documenting every set of human kids who become friends? Or every human who feeds a pet? Of course not. We only document these animal stories because they’re unusual.
Reality is boring. Lies entertain.
“But wait,” I hear you saying, “My dog totally loves me.”
Your dog is the result of thousands of years of selective breeding specifically for friendliness to humans. Also, you give it food. Does your dog give you food?
No.
Anyway, how nice are animals?
“Altruism” is defined (by the Wikipedia, anyway,) as, “behaviour by an individual that increases the fitness of another individual while decreasing the fitness of the actor.” Wikipedia defines “compassion” as a, “response to the suffering of others that motivates a desire to help.”
I’m not going to even try to define “love.”
Now, the definition of altruism itself hints that inter-species altruism probably isn’t a thing you’re going to see very often, because if the altruist increases the genes of another species at the expense of their own genes, then whatever genes originally drove the altruist to be altruistic become less common. Over time, the inter-species altruist gets replaced by everyone else, and altruism disappears.
This doesn’t mean that no one can ever be altruistic–altruism works just fine if it’s directed at your near kin. Animals that have a strong instinct to care for their family members and a certain level of intelligence can even apply that caring instinct to non-family. But I wouldn’t expect much friendliness from a crocodile.
It does means that claims about widespread altruism among animals toward other animals that aren’t family are probably nonsense.
The vast majority of observed instances of animal altruism involve close kin, pack members, or behavior that would normally be directed toward one’s kin but happened, by accident, to involve a non-related individual. The Wikipedia list on the subject, while incomplete and imperfect, gives a good impression.
In reality, the vast, vast majority of animals in this world do not give a shit about members not of their own species. Most of them don’t even care about members of their own species who aren’t family, and some will even eat their own children.
What about claim two, that humans suck at compassion?
Certainly some of us do. Humans aren’t as nice as I wish we were. Compassion, trust, kindness, etc., are all traits I would like to see more of in humans. But compared to animals, we look like Mother Theresa. How many animals set out little houses, baths, and seed-filled feeders for other animals? How many animals buy cancer treatments for their pets? For that matter, how many animals feed and care for a pet, period?
These behaviors are almost exclusively human.
Humans adopt orphans, run into burning buildings to rescue each other, fund social welfare nets, and spend a lot of time trying to prove to each other just how much they care about each other. Movies and novels basically wouldn’t exist without our capacity to empathize with strangers.
Humans support this level of altruism because our societies have bred us, like dogs, for it. (And since different societies are different, that means that different societies have bred different types/levels of altruism and compassion.) It is only in modern, first-world societies that we see anything resembling wide-spread altruism. Slavery–generally outlawed throughout the West in the late 17 or 1800s–is still common throughout many parts of Africa and the rest of the third world. If you really want to break your heart, just go read about Cambodian children sold as sex slaves at the age of 5. (Clearly the solution is more orangutans.)
(Seriously, what is the point of having a military if we don’t occasionally swoop into those brothels, behead everyone running the place, and then leave their heads on pikes about the city as warnings to everyone else?)
How about the final claim: Should we learn from the other apes?
Which do you think is friendlier, your dog or a wolf? The dog, obviously.
Human society has been getting steadily less violent for about as long as we’ve managed to account. Everyday life in non-state and pre-state societies is/was about as violent as Russia during WWII, only a bit more spread out. Chimpanzees, like wolves, are well-known for their violence. They wage war, form alliances to overthrow their leaders, and murder chimpanzee babies in order to breed faster with their mothers.
But what about bonobos?
I’ll grant that they have a lot of sex. They’re also known to be less aggressive than chimpanzees. This is not the same as being less aggressive than H sapiens. Until I see some data on bonobo homicide, I’m going to continue suspecting that bonobos are more violent than humans. Remember, some human societies–25 of them, though several of those are teeny–have gotten their murder rates down below 1 in 100,000 people. Since 50,000 is the high end estimate of number of bonobos on earth, if even one bonobo kills another bonobo once every two years, they’d still have 6x the homicide rate of Japan.
Not to mention that, unsurprisingly, empathy and “emotional intelligence” appear to correlaterather well withregular intelligence–and since humans are noticeably smarter (on average) than chimps, gorillas, bonobos, or tigers, this implies that we are probably better at empathizing with others, feeling compassion, and being generally altruistic.
This is pretty obvious to just about anyone who has ever had to deal with a bully, or looked at the average IQs of criminals.
All of which leads us back to our initial quandary: Why do people tell (and believe) such obvious lies?
I posit two reasons:
1. The other is but a foil for the self, and most people don’t really process words into their exact meanings, but into internal feeling-states. So when they say, “Animals are so caring and compassionate; we should be more like them,” they actually mean, “I like being caring and compassionate; you should be more like me.”
2. People who are caring and compassionate tend also to be caring and compassionate about animals, so thinking nice things about animals because it makes them happy.
Most of the time, people seem to remember that crime rates are actually lower among humans than among wild animals, and so don’t get too close to bears. (Sometimes they forget, but Gnon has his way with them.) But I do occasionally encounter people who really, truly seem to believe this. They really think that humans are irredeemably evil, and the world would be better off without us. But a world without humans would be a world with even less empathy and compassion than our current world, not more.
Here’s a hypothetical for you. Suppose Population A and Population B both live in a country. Population A started the place. They built it from scratch–farms, roads, transportation networks, the whole sheboodle. Population B doesn’t do so well financially, educationally, or organizationally, but they sure do have a lot of kids. In fact, while PopA has a modest 2 kids per couple, PopB does its best to turn out 6 or 7.
Most of PopA is totally oblivious, but a few smart guys in PopA can do math, and realize that pretty soon, PopB will outnumber them. Some among them start claiming that if they let PopB run things, well, things’ll just stop running.
I hypothesize that humans have only so many shits to give.
Some of us start out with more inherent ability to care than others do, but however much caring you’ve got in you, there’s probably not a lot you can do to increase it beyond that basic amount.
What you can do, however, is shift it around.
If things are going really badly for yourself, you’ll dedicate most of your energy to yourself–dealing with sickness, job loss, divorce, etc., leave very little energy leftover for anyone else. You are simply empty. You have no more shits to give.
If things are going badly for someone close to you–family or friend–you’ll dedicate much of your energy to them. A sick or suffering child, for example, will completely absorb your care.
Beyond your immediate circle of close friends and family, the ability to care about others drops dramatically, as the number of others increases dramatically. You might give a suffering acquaintance $5 or an hour of your time, but it is rare to otherwise go out of one’s way for strangers.
There are just way too many people in this category to care deeply about all of them. You don’t have that much time in your day. You can, however, care vaguely about their well-being. You can read about an earthquake in Nepal and feel really bad for those people.
One of the goals of moralists and philosophers has been (I think) to try to increase peoples’ concern for the well-being of others. If concern for others can actually be *increased*, then we may be able to care about ever-bigger groups of people. This would be especially good for people in modern society, as we now live among millions of people in countries of hundreds of millions on a planet with billions, while possessing nuclear weapons and the ability to destroy our own environment, it is pretty important that we feel at least some vague feelings of responsibility toward people who are not within our immediate friend/family circles.
Even if moralizers and the like can only cause a small increase in the amount of caring we can do, that still could be the difference between nuking a million people or not, so that’s still a valuable thing to try.
(Note that this kind of large-scale concern is probably entirely evolutionarily novel, as the ability to even know that people exist on the other side of the planet is evolutionarily novel. Most people throughout human history lived more or less in tiny hunter-gatherer bands and people not in their bands were basically enemies; it is only in a handful of countries over the past couple thousand years or so that this basic pattern has shifted.)
But to the extent that the number of shits we can give is fixed, we might end up just shuffling around our areas of concern.
And doing that seems likely to be prone to a variety of difficulties, like outrage fatigue (being unable to sustain a high level of caring for very long,) missing vital things that we should have been concerned about while being concerned about other things, and fucking things up via trying to fix problems we don’t actually know the first thing about and then getting distracted by the next concerning thing without ever making sure we actually improved things.
Well-meaning people often try hard to care about lots of things; they feel like they should be, somehow, treating others as they would themselves–that is, extending to everyone in the world the same level of caring and compassion. This is physically impossible, which leads to well-meaning people feeling bad about their inability to measure up to their standards of goodness. As Scot Alexander points out, it’s better to set reasonable goals for yourself and accomplish them than to set unreasonable goals and then fail.
My own recommendation is to beware of “caring” that is really just social posturing (putting someone down for not being hip to the latest political vocabulary, or not knowing very much about an obscure issue,) or any case of suddenly caring about the plight of “others” far away from you whom you didn’t care about five minutes ago. (Natural disasters excepted, as they obviously cause a significant change in people’s conditions overnight.) Understand your limits–realize that trying to solve problems of people you’ve never met and whom you know virtually nothing about is probably not going to work, but you can make life better for your friends, family, and local community. You can concentrate on understanding a few specific issues and devote time and resources to those.
So I was reading a fairytale to the younguns, “…’Spin me all this,’ said the Queen, ‘and when it is finished, you shall have my eldest son for your husband. Your poverty is a matter of no consequence to me, for I consider that your unremitting industry is an all sufficient dowry.”
I paused and said to my husband, “This is a German fairytale.”
We both started laughing.
There is something about German seriousness and industriousness that I find amusing; I suppose that makes Germans one of the few ethnic groups I find funny. It’s always with such little self-awareness that my German friends seem to comment about how they just don’t know why they work so hard and are such perfectionists.
Asian friends, similarly, complain about how they just can’t stop themselves from working hard and paying attention to tiny details, even when they’re quite sick or actually want to stop hyper-focusing on a particular project.
At any rate, I stand by my initial assessment of Rumpelstiltskin.
Meanwhile, have you seen the lovely new pictures of Pluto?
Isn’t this fucking amazing?
Charon, Pluto’s biggest moon.
Two to Tango
Oh, wait, those are Jupiter and Io. Well, I like them, too.
Empathy: the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.
False empathy is claiming empathy with people one has never met/has no connection with, for the purpose of harming/denying empathy to someone right in front of oneself, someone with whom you ought to have some sort of connection.
It is generally expressed as, “yes, I see you are hurting terribly, but I do not care because of your opinion on X”, or even, “No, you cannot actually be hurting, because of your opinion on X.”
This is not empathy. It’s a form of bullying; it drives people apart and decreases trust.
(Another form of false empathy is identifying with the suffering of others, but being completely clueless about their hopes, joys, angers, humor, or basically the vast majority of emotions and motivations they feel.)
The Huffington Post reports that The Murder Rate for Hispanics is Twice that for Whites. HuffPo is talking about victimization rates–that is, the number of Hispanics murdered, not murdering. But murder is largely a within-group phenomenon–that is, people tend to target their own–so most of those dead Hispanics were probably killed by other Hispanics.
The Color of Crime reports incarceration rates that match HuffPo’s victimization rates:
(And, in general, the Color of Crime report demonstrates that incarceration rates reflect actual offending rates.)
Note that the Color of Crime graph is not an absolute rate, but a multiple–a multiple of 1 means that the crime rate is equal to the white crime rate; a multiple of 2 means it is twice the white crime rate; a multiple of 0.5 means the rate is half that of whites. Asians tend to offend at statistically insignificant rates. Pacific Islanders apparently really like stealing cars (maybe it’s just easier to find stolen cars on a small island in the middle of the ocean than on a big continent.) High manslaughter among the Indians is probably a result of drunk driving. And Hispanics commit all crimes at a rate of slightly less than 2.5 times that of whites.
“Ah, but “Hispanics” and “Hispanic immigrants” are not the same group,” I hear you saying. That is irrelevant; the children of immigrants only get here via their parents immigrating, and it appears that the children of immigrants actually have much higher crime rates than their parents. No one is comforted that their attacker’s parents were immigrants, rather than immigrants themselves. Either way, immigration is at play.
Other people estimate other crime rates:
Source: La Griffe du Lion, Crime and the Hispanic Effect. In this case, the match between the HuffPo data and the Color of Crime data makes me trust it better than La Griffe du Lion’s, even though I normally find La Griffe pretty credible.
Why such debate over crime rates? Because the FBI hasn’t historically counted “Hispanics” in its crime stats (though I hear they are going to start.) “Hispanic” isn’t a race, it’s just a word that means that you or your ancestors spoke Spanish. Hispanics therefore can be–and are–members of any race.
Now, there is quite obviously something major going on in our data: the black crime rate. Yes, the Hispanic crime rate is lower than the black crime rate.
Let’s play with some numbers. Let’s suppose we’ve got 320 million Americans. We’ll estimate the black crime rate at 20 out of 1000, the white at 5/1000, and the Hispanic at 10/1ooo.
If our population is 10% black + 90% white = 2 black crimes / 1000 + 4.5 white crimes / 1000 = 2,080,000 total crimes. (This reflects the demographics of 1920.)
If our population is 10% black + 65% white + 25% Hispanic = 2 black crimes / 1000 + 3.25 white crimes / 1000 + 2.5 Hispanic crimes / 1000 = 2,160,000 total crimes. (This is closer to our modern demographics.)
That is, 80,000 extra crimes per year.
(Obviously I am simplifying by leaving out small groups like Indians and Asians, [who don’t particularly commit much crime, anyway.])
Why yes, Barbie, math is hard. But this is 5th grade math. Murdoch really ought to have mastered it already.
But what about El Paso? According to Wikipedia list of cities by crime rate, Plano, TX, has 1/3 the violent crime rate of El Paso. Its murder rate is less than 12% of El Paso’s. If you’ve ever been to Plano, the reasons are obvious: It’s full of Asians and middle class whites, and Asians don’t commit much crime. Lincoln, Nebraska is also safer than El Paso, and Portland, Oregon has a lower murder rate.
El Paso’s relatively low crime rate is because violent crime in the US is largely driven by black crime rates, and there aren’t a lot of blacks in El Paso. If you happen to replace a black community with an Hispanic one, you will get a lower crime rate. But unlike whites, blacks as a percent of the US haven’t really been dropping, so this would only be a local effect.
Also, I do wonder whether El Paso’s not-legally-in-the-country sub-population is very likely to call the police when crimes against them occur.
At any rate, let’s have a look at Mexico’s murder rate:
Mexico is one of the top scorers, at 21.5. The US rate is 4.7.
Now, immigration is not random, so a country’s emigrants aren’t necessarily going to reflect the country’s overall crime rates. But since criminality does have a fairly large genetic component, the Mexican (and other Latin American countries’) crime rates are high enough to give pause.
What about the claim that all immigrants have a lower crime rate than Americans?
That depends, I suppose, on how we define “all immigrants.” Are we speaking globally of the aggregate of all immigrants headed anywhere? I have no idea if anyone has even collected such data. According to the Wikipedia page on Immigration and Crime,
“The Handbook of Crime Correlates (2009), a review of studies of correlates with crime, states that most studies on immigrants have found higher rates of crime. However, this varies greatly depending on the country of origin, with immigrants from some regions having lower crime rates than the indigenous population. In the US, studies have found lower crime rates among immigrants than among non-immigrants. Other studies suggest that immigration generally does not lead to an increase in crime, and may in some instances, suppress such trends. Other statistics, such as those from Europe, show higher crime rates among immigrant populations.”
In other words, trying to aggregate all immigrants is dumb, because different immigrant groups (and their children) commit crime at different rates. Japanese immigrants in LA have a different crime rate than Somalis in Minneapolis (and not because of any inherent differences between LA and Minneapolis.) Indonesian immigrants have low crime rates; Moroccans have higher rates.
Here are some more quotes from the Wikipedia page on immigration and crime:
“the relative proportion … of crimes by non-Japanese is substantially higher than those by Japanese … per capita Africans are responsible for 3.5 times as much crime as Japanese natives.
“According to the figures from Danmarks Statistik, crime rate among refugees and their descendants is 73% higher than for the male population average, even when taking into account their socioeconomic background. A report from Teori- og Metodecentret from 2006 found that seven out of ten young people placed on the secured youth institutions in Denmark are immigrants (with 40 percent of them being refugees).
“According to official statistics, 21.0% of rapes have been committed by foreigners in Finland. Foreigners comprise 2.2% of the population.
“A 2006 study found that the share of immigrants has a positive and significant impact on the crime rate …
“In Berlin, young male immigrants are three times more likely to commit violent crimes than their German peers.
“Official statistics show that immigrants are responsible for about half of the criminal activity in Greece. The Greek police have admitted that armed gangs entering the country from neighbouring Albania or Bulgaria could have been attracted by reports that many people have been withdrawing cash from banks and stashing it in their homes.
” More than half of Moroccan-Dutch youths aged 18 to 24 years in Rotterdam have been in trouble with the police for the suspicion of a crime. Young Antillean and Surinamese Rotterdammers are strongly overrepresented in crime statistics. Of them, 40 percent have been suspected. Of indigenous young people aged from 18 to 24, 18% percent already came in contact with criminal law. … of 447 criminal files, 63% teenagers convicted of serious crime are children of parents born outside the Netherlands. … The proportion of these persons in the suspect population is therefore almost twice as high as the share of immigrants among the Dutch population. The highest suspect rates per capita are found among first (4.9) and second generation (7.1) male migrants from a non‐western background. Rates for so‐called ‘western migrants’ are very close to those of the native Dutch.
“The report shows that, of 131 individuals charged with the 152 [Norwegian] rapes in which the perpetrator could be identified, 45.8% were of African, Middle Eastern or Asian origin while 54.2% were of Norwegian, other European or American origin.
“In Switzerland, 69.7% of prison population had no Swiss citizenship, compared to 22.1% of total resident population (as of 2008).
“[In Sweden,] immigrants were found to be four times more likely to be investigated for lethal violence and robbery than ethnic Swedes. In addition, immigrants were three times more likely to be investigated for violent assault, and five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes. Overall, North Africa and Western Asia were strongly overrepresented in the crime statistics.”
Okay, so clearly some immigrants, in some places, commit crime. But what about immigrants in the US?
“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2001, 4% of Hispanic males in their twenties and thirties were in prison or jail, compared to 1.8% of non-Hispanic white males.”
Occidental Dissent has done everyone a favor and disaggregated the Arizona Crime data by race, producing these colorful pie charts:
The crime rate among Asian immigrants, by contrast, is of course very low–down around 30% (or less) of the white rate. It makes a big difference where your immigrants come from.
Now, there is more to life than crime rates. But I reserve the right to decide which kind of risks and how much of them I am willing to take, based on actual, honest data, not based on mass media billionaire owners lying to me.
Why is Murdoch lying?
Perhaps he’s just really dumb. Or maybe he lives in a really rich area where crime (and unemployment) just aren’t things people worry about. Maybe he’s just trying to signal liberal tribal identity. Or maybe–like many people in the business of employing other people–he stands to personally benefit from the importation of millions of low-wage migrants.
While we’re at it:
No, no. That’s Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a libertarian. Rand Paul is a regular ol’ conservative. I know they’re easy to confuse since their names sound similar, but if I can keep them straight, then so can you.
