(NewsNation) — Venezuelan migrants have been fleeing to the U.S. in droves, and the issue of potential criminals coming to the U.S. has become a hot topic after the death of nursing student Laken Riley on the University of Georgia campus in Athens, Georgia.
Jose Ibarra, a Venezuelan who crossed illegally into the U.S., has been named a suspect in her death, leading Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and others to blame President Joe Biden’s immigration policies for Riley’s death.
But Princeton University Professor Douglas Massey told NewsNation that while any group of a sufficient size will have some criminals, immigrants do not pose a greater risk.
“If you’re looking at the data, on average, immigrants commit fewer crimes than natives,” he said on “NewsNation Now.” “Crime is a human thing. But the rate of crime is actually lower in immigrant neighborhoods because they want to stay here and stay out of trouble.”
Multiple studies analyzing crime data have shown that immigrants actually commit crimes at a much lower rate than U.S. citizens for both violent and nonviolent crimes.
In what has been called the largest displacement crisis in the world, nearly eight million Venezuelan migrants traveled to the U.S. last year, where the Border Patrol apprehended 266,000 of them. That number is roughly the same population as Toledo, Ohio, and there’s a chance that 2024 will exceed that number. Already this fiscal year, Border Patrol has apprehended 144,000 Venezuelans.
The route immigrants take to the U.S. is treacherous, many traveling through the jungles of Central America while others take the VIP route, paying up to $5,000 to bypass the jungle in a plane and embark on a ship to Nicaragua.
Massey said people who are fleeing Venezuela are escaping a failed state and a collapsed economy.
“People are literally fleeing for their lives,” he said. “Life expectancy has gone down by about two years in the past five years. They can’t even keep the power grid on, and they don’t have any gasoline to sell even though they’re sitting on the world’s largest stocks of petroleum.”
Massey said the crisis in Venezuela dates back to the election of Hugo Chavez in 1999, and it’s unlikely the country will change some of its policies, including refusing to take back citizens deported from the U.S.
“The vast majority of people are really desperate to survive. They’re leaving in droves,” he said.
While American cities have been outspoken about the struggle to deal with an increase in asylum-seekers and migrants, Massey noted that the U.S. isn’t even seeing the worst of the Venezuela crisis.
“The brunt has been born by Colombia, Peru, Ecuador and Chile,” he explained. “We’re actually getting a small fraction of the people that are fleeing. We tend to get the ones with more education and more occupational skills because you need resources to make your way to the border.”
Massey said there’s not much that can be done to stop the wave of migration because people fleeing out of desperation are not likely to be deterred by sanctions or border enforcement. The best thing, he said, would be for the U.S. to address the dysfunctional asylum system to handle the humanitarian crisis better.
“Fix up the asylum system to process applications and make it an orderly process,” he said. “Right now, the border looks chaotic because our asylum system is not working.”
