When the Cato Institute releases a report that is counter to its own tendencies, you sit up and listen. This, from today’s American Statesman:

IMMIGRATION

Immigrant Crime Study Rebuts Claims

Criminal conviction rate far lower than for native-born people, data show.

By Dianne Solis, The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — An analysis released Monday by the libertarian Cato Institute shows that unauthorized immigrants and legal immigrants in Texas commit proportionally fewer crimes than the native-born population.

The study found that unauthorized immigrants had a criminal conviction rate 56 percent below that of the native-born people, said Alex Nowrasteh, a Cato immigration analyst and the study’s author.

“And that tells us this is not a population that commits a lot of crime,” Nowrasteh said. “If it is true of Texas, it has got to be true in much of the United States.”

Legal immigrants — a category that includes immigrants who became U.S. citizens — have even lower rates of criminal convictions, at 85 percent below the native-born, the study found. “Legal immigrants are much more law-abiding than virtually any other group in our society,” Nowrasteh said.

At the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank that advocates for more immigration restrictions, executive director Mark Krikorian said, “A lot of data does suggest immigrants are less likely to be involved in crime.”

But the quality of the data hasn’t been good in past studies, said Krikorian, who hadn’t seen Nowrasteh’s report yet. Regardless, Krikorian said, “Even a single crime by one immigrant is bad because they are not supposed to be here.”

The study uses data from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Unlike other states such as California and Illinois, Texas law enforcement cooperates closely with federal immigration agencies, bolstering the accuracy of the data because of the sharing of details such as fingerprints, Nowrasteh said.

The report’s release comes as an immigration crackdown has become a signature issue for the administration of President Donald Trump. Trump and his allies frequently use crimes committed by immigrants in the U.S. without legal status to broadly position immigrants as dangerous.