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Letter Submitted to the Orange County Register Responding “For UCI professor, sharing data about immigrants and crime is risky,” which claims the professor taking the left wing position that illegals don’t commit much crime is somehow heroic

Mar 13, 2026 | op-ed

Letters that we submitted op-ed

Responding to this piece in the Orange County Register (California), though it wasn’t published by the newspaper. Links to sources for the New York data. The Maricopa County Attorney’s Office data is here. More information here.

Dear Editor:

Your article on UCI Professor Charis Kubrin (“For UCI professor, sharing data about immigrants and crime is risky,” March 8) is disappointing because it fails to ask her any hard questions. For example, she cites data from the Texas prison system but overlooks an important factor: Texas works closely with ICE, and authorities often deport illegal immigrants when they are arraigned at the county courthouse or convicted—before they ever enter jail or prison, so illegals are underrepresented among incarcerated people.

The same problem affects the American Community Survey used by CATO and others. That survey also depends on people honestly self-reporting their immigration status. Yet many illegal immigrants are understandably reluctant to disclose that information, and incarcerated individuals are likely to be even more reluctant to do so.

The discussion ignores recent data released by ICE last December showing that illegal immigrants make up at least 14.0% of incarcerated people in New York—at least 3.4 times their share of the state’s general population. A Maricopa County Attorney’s Office study revealed that illegal immigrants committed 21.8% of felonies sentenced in Maricopa County Superior Court, over twice their proportion of Arizona’s population. 

Real courage by Kubrin would have been to question the group think in left wing academia.

Sincerely,

John R. Lott, Jr., Ph.D.
President
Crime Prevention Research Center

johnrlott

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