9 Things You Need To Know About Illegal Immigration And Crime

Illegal immigration and crime became a hot topic this election cycle as soon as Donald Trump burst into the Republican primary with his call to build a wall to keep criminal illegal aliens out of the country. Such policy discussions have fallen by the wayside as the election cycle morphed into a mudslinging fight of personal insults and accusations of sexual assaults, but the link between illegal immigration and crime is still worth discussing, especially since Trump's initial highlighting of the issue fueled his rise.

Here are nine things you need to know about illegal immigration and crime.

1. Federal, state and local governments keep data involving illegal immigration and crime out of the public purview. Fox News reported in 2015 that a source from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) said "that comprehensive statistics on illegal immigrant crime are not available from the federal government, and suggested contacting county, state and federal jail and prison systems individually to compose a tally, a process that would encompass thousands of local departments."

Former Department of Justice attorney J. Christian Adams also told Fox News that some states do readily track illegal immigration and crime, but they withhold the specific numbers from the public out of fear of backlash from the federal government or for political purposes.

However, there is still some data that can be pieced together to examine illegal immigration and crime, and evidence suggests that there is a correlation between the two.

2. Available evidence suggests that illegals are more likely to commit crimes than the rest of the population.

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