Roundup #82: Staring in wonder at the world

I waited too long to do this roundup, and the amount of interesting stuff built up to truly vast proportions. So let’s get right to it.

1. Crime is down!

I often get annoyed with people who trumpet falling crime in American cities. Often, these same people are silent in the years when crime rises — for example, 2015-2021. This means that all those cries of “Crime is down!” might only bring us back to where we were before.

Also, even when crime falls in America, it still generally leaves us about 5x as violent as Europe. People who use crime drops to wave away the need for further intensified policing, increased incarceration of repeat offenders, and other tough-on-crime measures completely ignore the very high baseline level of American violence.

That said, I often find myself being one of the people trumpeting drops in crime. Sometimes we do make genuine progress, and when this happens, we ought to take note. Successful crime reductions in particular cities can serve as pilot programs, giving us ideas about how to fight crime more systematically across the country. And big crime drops show us that America is not simply an incorrigibly criminal nation; real progress is possible!

So while cautioning that the job of making America safe is just beginning, I’m pleased to report the following data, via Axios:

Murder is the most reliable indicator of violence, but it’s not just murder that’s falling:

Violent crime fell sharply across the largest U.S. cities in early 2026…The declines show up across every major region, suggesting a systemic, nationwide trend…Homicides dropped 17.7%…Robberies fell 20.4%…Rapes declined 7.2%...Aggravated assaults decreased 4.8%.

My instinct (combined with reading a bunch of news stories) says that this is probably the result of a bunch of local law enforcement efforts, combined with falling popular unrest in the nation as a whole. But I’ll wait until more definitive evidence emerges.

In the meantime, we need to keep being tough on crime — especially Democrats, who really faltered on this in 2020-21. Voters still approve of the GOP more than the Dems on the crime issue, and far more voters think we need to be tougher on crime than think the opposite:

2. Trump’s immigration raids aren’t helping the working class

One of Trump’s big selling points in 2024 was that deporting illegal immigrants en masse would help America’s working class, by removing labor competition and forcing up wages. In fact, this is something that anti-immigration people have repeated again and again, more than perhaps any other argument: Immigrants drive down wages, immigrants drive down wages, immigrants drive down wages.

As far as we can tell, it just isn’t true. Immigration — even low-skilled immigration — creates a labor demand shock that balances out the labor supply shock (because the same immigrants who supply labor also demand products that are made with labor). Almost every study finds this. But the anti-immigration people, undeterred, just bull ahead with the mantra that immigrants drive down wages.

OK, so Trump came back to office and, unlike in his first term, actually started arresting and kicking out an unusually large number of immigrants — and scaring many more into leaving on their own. And did it end up benefitting the working class, by reducing labor supply? No it did not. Cox and East have a new paper that uses local variations in ICE enforcement under Trump 2.0 to examine how a big increase in immigrant arrests affects economic conditions for native-born Americans in the same industry and location. The result? No effect, of course, and possibly even a small negative effect: