I recall the name John Lott, PhD. from my twenties or thirties. Reports on his work were published in the libertarian rag REASON Magazine, generally finding research support for NRA positions regarding the practice of generally carrying guns. In one study, he claimed to detect a decrease in the crime rate around those municipalities which had lightened up on gun control laws. I was favorably impressed at the time.
Since then, on rare occasion I run across his name – usually in a poor light. I put it down to the writer in question not liking him or his conclusions. But now I see Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, claims he has caught Lott out in a paper on illegal immigrants:
Economist John R. Lott Jr. of the Crime Prevention Research Center released a working paper in which he purports to find that illegal immigrants in Arizona from 1985 through 2017 have a far higher prison admissions rate than U.S. citizens. Media from Fox News to the Washington Times and the Arizona Republic have reported on Lott’s claims while Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) have echoed them from their positions of authority. However, Lott made a small but fatal error that undermines his finding.
Lott wrote his paper based on a dataset he obtained from the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) that lists all admitted prisoners in the state of Arizona from 1985 to 2017. According to Lott, the data allowed him to identify “whether they [the prisoners] are illegal or legal residents.” This is where Lott made his small error: The dataset does not allow him or anybody else to identify illegal immigrants.[i]
The variable that Lott focused on is “CITIZEN.” That variable is broken down into seven categories. Lott erroneously assumed that the third category, called “non-US citizen and deportable,” only counted illegal immigrants. That is not true, non-US citizen and deportable immigrants are not all illegal immigrants. A significant proportion of non-U.S. citizens who are deported every year are legal immigrants who violate the terms of their visas in one way or the other, frequently by committing crimes. According to the American Immigration Council, about 10 percent of people deported annually are Lawful Permanent Residents or green card holders—and that doesn’t include the non-immigrants on other visas who were lawfully present in the United States and then deported. I will write more about this below.
Too bad for Lott. Kevin Drum’s feelings are on display concerning Lott in a post entitled “John Lott Makes a Mistake. Again. News at 11.”:
Last week, John Lott released a working paper showing that illegal immigrants in Arizona “are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.” I didn’t bother reading it or reporting on it because Lott is spectacularly dishonest and unreliable in his work and it’s not worth the time to pore through his dreck to find out how he tortured the data.
Source: Alex Nowrasteh
In case you were wondering about proper figures, it appears precision is impossible due to the nature of the dataset (not to mention human error in data entry, etc), but Alex does provide a nice graph of estimates,
which suggests immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than natural born Americans.
What’s the lesson here? Be careful who you admire when you’re young, perhaps. And, to justify the title of this post, I have to say that seeing he’s a gun-rights advocate, and, given his apparent right-ward tilt, probably anti-immigrant, leaves a taste in my mouth. The taste of someone who wants a particular conclusion and will search for it until he gets it.
Real scientists let the evidence tell the story, dictate the conclusion. If, in fact, Lott just tries to prove his preferred conclusion, then despite his Ph.D. and various prestigious academic positions, he’s just a fraud.
