TX congressman: 90% of small business hit by ‘illegal immigrant’ crime. What the data says

Citing anecdotal evidence of crime statistics, U.S. Rep. Roger Williams on Tuesday announced that he introduced a bill that would require the federal government to reimburse Texas for its expenses to secure the border with Mexico.

“The federal government can either take responsibility of the crisis at our southern border or get out of the way and let Texas do it,” he said during a press conference at the Tarrant County Sheriff’s Office in downtown Fort Worth.

The conference was held after Williams participated in a briefing with Tarrant County Sheriff Bill Waybourn as well as the sheriffs of Parker, Wise and Collin counties.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded more than 242,000 encounters at the U.S.-Mexico in November, the most recent month for which data is available. The number includes repeat entries.

“As we speak today, right now, I will tell you, there is an invasion going on in our border,” Williams told reporters before stating that the sheriffs briefed him on “how the influx of illegal immigrants has impacted local communities in their day-to-day world.”

Such impacts include high rates of property crimes like break-ins committed by unauthorized immigrants, said Williams, a Willow Park Republican.

“There’s areas in America that 90% of small businesses have been affected by break-ins and thefts, physical challenges by illegals and it’s affecting the small business community,” he said.

Asked where he got that statistic from, Williams cited an anecdote he heard during a hearing last week of the House Small Business Committee, of which he is chairman.

“That’s a stat that came out of the hearing I had in D.C. last week from a lady, I can’t remember where she’s from, talked about 90% of the people in her world, small business world, and this community is somehow affected by break-ins or robberies or something like that,” he said during an interview following the press conference. “And it all relates back to making it hard to do business on Main Street, America, because you have to recover from that.”

In a separate interview, Waybourn was asked how crime by undocumented immigrants directly affects Tarrant County. He cited high rates of opioid overdoses and their effects on medical services, among other crimes. He said there were 2,400 overdoses during a recent eight-month span.

“We’ve got several illegals in jail for various amounts of crime, and we have foreigners in the community, they’re impacting law enforcement, yes, impacting our schools, probably, impacting our ER rooms, our infrastructures,” he said.

Statements like Williams’ and Waybourn’s lack specificity and are ultimately inaccurate, according to Michael T. Light, a sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied comparative crime rates between native-born U.S. citizens, undocumented immigrants and documented immigrants.

“There’s no evidence to suggest that undocumented immigrants commit disproportionate amount of property crime, even minor property crime,” he said in a phone interview.

He published his findings in a 2020 paper published in the scientific journal PNAS. Using data complied by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which records the immigration status of all people who are arrested in the state, the study found that crime rates are not higher among undocumented immigrants.

“Of course, undocumented migrants commit crime,” Light said. “The question is, or at least the question that we’re interested in is, Do they commit a disproportionate amount of crime? And there the answer suggests no.”

The Texas DPS publishes its Texas Criminal Illegal Alien Data online. However, Light pointed out that the data is not presented as rates comparative to other demographics, merely crime counts.

“I think most people, really what they’re concerned of is how much do they commit a disproportionate amount of crime?” Light said.

Data published by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank based in Washington D.C., found that the criminal conviction rate among undocumented immigrants in Texas in 2020 was 45% lower than that of native-born U.S. citizens in Texas.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection crime statistics appear to discredit another of Williams’ claims that “murders are up due to a lot of border people being here.”

CBP data show that murder convictions of criminal non-U.S. citizens spiked in 2021 and 2022, with 60 and 62 convictions. That number dropped to 29 last year, and did not go over three in the years dating back to 2017.

The CBP data does show that property crimes like burglary among non-U.S. citizens began to rise in 2021 with 825 convictions, up from 143 in 2020. That number has not gone over 900 in the years since, and the 896 convictions recorded in 2022 represent one-tenth of 1% of the nearly 850,000 burglaries nationwide recorded by the FBI.

Williams expressed surprise at a Supreme Court ruling on Monday allowing federal agents to cut razor wire Texas installed on US-Mexico border, but said that it would not deter Texas from taking action at the border.

“I think Texas has got to continue to do what they can, from physical barriers to changing laws … because there’s no support from this administration in law and order,” he said.

When asked if his bill aligns with his values of limited government and less spending, Williams said border protection takes priority.

“I’m a less government guy … getting out of the federal government and so forth, but we’ve never seen this happen before, we’ve never had our country invaded like we’re seeing right now,” he said.