Fewer Illegals, Lower Murder Rate, Higher Wages?

I was intrigued by a recent observation that this year, the US may have its lowest murder rate ever.

Answering this question starts with identifying the previous record low rate. The current record low occurred in 2014 when the FBI reported a murder rate of 4.45 per 100,000. That’s slightly lower than the murder rates reported in 2013 (4.53), 1963 (4.58) and 1962 (4.59). Prior to that the FBI didn’t really release national murder estimates with sufficient participation to rely on.

. . . It’s still early in 2025, but murder is down an enormous amount so far. The [Real-Time Crime Index] has it down more than 20 percent through February, fatal shootings are down 14 percent in the Gun Violence Archive, the Major Cities Chiefs Association has homicide down more than 20 percent in the first quarter, and I recently found a greater than 20 percent decline in the 30 cities with the most murders in 2023.

. . . If this decline continues through the Fall then we should seriously start having a discussion about the probability of a record breaking year. Until then, it’s sufficient to be aware of and measuring the possibility of a new record low.

The piece doean't speculate over any cause, it just reports the decline. But this took me back to a question that had been on my mind since I saw an episode of the true crime series See No Evil that aired this past June 3. In the episode, Gabriel Perez, 20, is shot to death at 5:30 AM while sitting on a curb with his skateboard outside a McDonald's in Fargo, ND. The shots were fired from a vehicle that sped away.

The driver was later identified as Miguel J Cooley, who suspected Perez was having an affair with his wife. Perez had been cruising around Fargo all night on his skateboard, which apparently was his sole mode of transportation, and had in fact hooked up with Cooley's wife via phone text not long before. She had agreed to meet Perez outside the McDonald's, which is why Perez was there, but Cooley had discovered the texts on his wife's phone and met Perez outside the McDonald's instead and shot him.

While the show portrayed the detectives solving the crime, it left many questions unanswered, not least of which was how Mexicans wound up in Fargo, ND, about 100 miles from the Canadian border. Perez's family described him as a "goofy" sort of guy with a sense of humor, but gave little explanation of why he spent his nights roving around Fargo on his skateboard and how he might have earned a living.

The episode was equally silent about Cooley, who lived with his wife in Moorhead, MN. They had a car, which was more than Perez had, but again, we're told nothing of their nationality, occupation, or how they all managed to be up to all sorts of mischief so early in the morning.

Because the first link above is seemingly so reluctant to speculate on why the US murder rate has been plunging so drastically, I'm forced to make my own associations: I suspect that people who otherwise might be in places like Fargo, ND, spending the early hours of the morning on skateboards arranging trysts outside McDonald's and getting blown away by jealous husbands are instead leaving the country in significant numbers.

A atatement from the White House yesterday reported another positive trend:

In President Donald J. Trump’s first five months in office, real wages for hourly workers have seen their largest increase under any administration in nearly 60 years — and we’re just getting started with pro-growth, pro-prosperity policies that finally put America First.

Blue-collar workers have seen real wages grow almost two percent in the first five months of President Trump’s second term — a stark contrast from the negative wage growth seen during the first five months of the Biden Administration.

“The only other time it has been this high … was during President Trump’s first term,” Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent said in an interview with the New York Post.

From Stephen Kruiser at PJ Media:

The only semblance of an argument that the Democrats have ever had about illegal immigration is that the illegals are here doing the jobs that Americans won't do. Because of the historical lack of will to undertake the task of mass deportations, it was an argument that was difficult to disprove.

. . . The notion that illegal immigrants became a significant part of the labor pool in the United States because Americans just decided to stop working is absurd. American workers were replaced with cheaper options, plain and simple. Employers got addicted to their off-the-books, substandard-pay laborers. It never had anything to do with concern for illegal immigrants or the lack of available American workers.

. . . A restaurant just up the street from me was hit with a big ICE raid a couple of months ago and lost so many workers that it had to shut down for several days. It's been up and running just fine since then, though. It even got a new paint job. Given the fact that the place was under ICE scrutiny, I can't imagine that the owners went out and hired a bunch of illegals in order to reopen.

Via the Washington Examiner:

Another 2024 top pollster has recorded an approval rating high for President Donald Trump, the latest in a trend showing that liberal attacks are bouncing off a political Golden Dome surrounding him.

InsiderAdvantage, rated the second-best national pollster in 2024, put its mid-June approval rating at a sky-high 54% and its disapproval down to 44%.

This is consistent with Rasmussen.

UPDATE:

The far-left Wall Street Journal estimates that America’s immigrant population has declined by 773,000 since President Trump assumed office in January 2025. The far-left Washington Post puts the estimate of foreign-born workers leaving the workforce at around an even million.