Talk:Illegal immigration to the United States

Edits Needed for Grammar, Clarity
I don't meet the requirements for editing a semi-protected article. Can someone please fix this for me?

In the overview (the first section, before the comments), the second-to-last sentence reads:

"Sanctuary cities – which adopt policies designed to not prosecute people solely for being in the country illegally – have no statistically meaningful impact on crime or reduce the crime rate."

Logically speaking, it's redundant to say they have no statistically meaningful impact on crime and also that they don't reduce the crime rates. But first, just grammatically speaking, it should read:

"Sanctuary cities – which adopt policies designed to not prosecute people solely for being in the country illegally – have no statistically meaningful impact on crime, nor do they reduce the crime rate."

This is still syntactically incorrect though, because as-written, this sentence means sanctuary cities reduce the crime rate, which isn't what the author was trying to say, because that is either incomplete or nonsensical. I'm pretty sure they were trying to indicate that sanctuary cities do not have different crime rates or lower crime rates (again, redundant) solely by dint of being sanctuary cities. Also, "statistically meaningful" is a weird way to say "statistically significant", so I changed that too. Finally, "designed to not prosecute" is a) awkwardly worded and b) confusing, so I fixed that too. All told, if I am interpreting the author correctly, a better way to put this is:

"Sanctuary cities – which adopt policies designed to prevent the prosecution of people solely for being in the country illegally – do not have statistically significant differences in crime rates when compared to non-sanctuary cities with comparable traits."

BUT! If I'm wrong about what the original author meant and they were trying to say that sanctuary cities don't impact crime rates in the larger region they are in, though, it should be:

"Sanctuary cities – which adopt policies designed to prevent the prosecution of people solely for being in the country illegally – do not have any statistically significant impact on regional crime rates."

AN ADDENDUM FROM ANOTHER VIEWER:    I would like to know what type of statistical test and the significance level being employed to determine 'statistical significance/ non-significance'. Were the data employed fulfilling the assumptions of randomness, normal distribution and equal variances? If not, were they appropriately transformed? Simply failing to reject the alternative hypothesis does not necessarily mean the null hypothesis is correct - in conducting the test in this case, one has simply failed to reject the null hypothesis.

Please stop abusing inferential statistics to make political cases. The references provided are not academic, peer-reviewed papers. They are linked to think-tank and news agencies that have had political connections for decades and often employ poor statistical rigour or none at all. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.145.95.151 (talk • contribs) 18:05, November 30, 2018 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: LIBR 1 Working with Sources W
— Assignment last updated by PoMoncho (talk) 20:39, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

Need to add the specific causes that push migrants and asylum seekers to enter the United States illegally
I think that the page on illegal immigration to the United States doesn't do a good job of explaining why do migrants enter the country illegally instead of taking a legal path. Although it does explain the pull factors on why many people would want to go to United States, whether it be economic opportunities, family ties or even to escape terrible situations, the fact remains that an abnormally large amount of people aren't coming through the legal path, and there's a reason for that: basically, the US immigration system is clogged up, because it has strict caps on how many people of any specific profession, whether it be tech entrepreneurs, workers or students can come in, and this means that waiting times can be prohibitively long, literally stretching back decades. Here's two great videos that explain the situation, that have collected a lot of data from different sources that allows to paint the picture: Watch these, and come to your own conclusion. I would like to hear your opinions on their takes, and if the main page should feature the reasons that drives people to migrate to the United States illegally. GabMen20 (talk) 01:27, 8 February 2024 (UTC)
 * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTIDCA7mjZs&t=617s (Wendover Productions Video, September 9th 2020. The narrator doesn't get involved with politicians, and is more neutral as he storytells the facts and data.)
 * https://youtube.com/tXqnRMU1fTs?si=6zOvJ5tX9t4urDoz (Comedy News segment from Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, September 16th 2019. For those who want to learn what he's explaining, just ignore the initial jokes from the host, who himself passed through the immigration system when he migrated to the United States.)


 * first link is not available and the second one is unreliable as it comes from an anonymous source.
 * also, Wikipedia is not a forum to discuss opinions. Eldaniay (talk) 23:58, 9 February 2024 (UTC)


 * I don't think a late-night comedy show segment qualifies as a reputable source on factors relating to immigration to the United States. An equivalent practice to that would be citing a Monty Python sketch as a serious source into the causes behind the Spanish Inquisition. For such a nuanced and specific topic, citing mass media, especially media designed for a comedy show, would be inappropriate, I believe. Late night television is not exactly a valuable trove of knowledge. An additional problem is that John Oliver obviously does not use in-text citations or publish a bibliography in the credits of his show, so many of the claims made would be impossible to independently verify.


 * The second video has already been discussed by Eldaniay. It's an amateur-produced video published anonymously, with no citations or verifiable basis for its claims. Perhaps interesting as a rough primer on the issue, not exactly a reputable source.


 * And just overall, the question of "What causes illegal immigrants to immigrant illegally as opposed to the traditional, legal means of doing so" seems too attenuated to be worth discussing in this article. Such a specific, nuanced question probably is best left to the scientific journals and academics studying the field (See WP:NOTTEXTBOOK). Or perhaps if deemed important enough, contained in it's own article. But in any case, I would hope any inclusion of said topic would use real sources, not youtube videos, when discussing the issue. BabbleOnto (talk) 03:46, 11 February 2024 (UTC)
 * This is a good approach to my proposition, and I get your point.
 * In any case, the point of me showing those videos isn't to use them as sources for the entire article, but to use the very sources that they used to illustrate the situation with the legal migration system (the same reason that people shouldn't use Wikipedia as a source, but rather the original sources that are linked in the articles).
 * As you said, Last Week Tonight's videos don't provide a bibliography for their sources, however they're still shown on-screen, and can be searched up; I've done this myself several times. Besides, Last Week Tonight can't be compared with Monty Python (having watched both extensively), as the former is from a genre known as 'comedy news', in which comedians report on real-life news and events; this is drastically different from something like a full blown comedy skit show like 'Monty Python's Flying Circus' or 'The Benny Hill Show'.
 * Even though John Oliver has historically defended his program as a comedy show, many independent analysts and commentators have identified his work as a form of journalism or even investigative journalism, the sources in which you can find in the 'Critical Response' chapter in the Wikipedia page of the program. Even John Oliver himself admitted that although he claims his show is 'technically a comedy show', he is 'better at hiding it than most'.
 * As for the Wendover Productions video, while sometimes relying on speculation, this is overwhelmingly guided by raw data and tendencies that can connect the dots; in other words, it does have references, that are located at the bottom of it's descriptions: it has a bibliography. Besides, it's narrator is well known, and his team is credited in the description of the video. The video's still amateurish in some ways, but the references are there, and they can be used to back several claims about the causes and trajectories of illegal immigrants.
 * I'm not saying that you should use the videos as the sources for the causes of illegal migration, but instead use the original sources that those channels used to make their point. GabMen20 (talk) 21:07, 14 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't find much weight in someone describing their own work as "definitely reputable" as a meaningful determination of what sources we should be trusting. Also, saying "many independent analysts and commentators have identified his work as a form of journalism" are just weasel words. You cite to the Wikipedia article for Last Week Tonight, as evidence for this contention, which has two problems. One, we shouldn't rely on ourselves for verification of who is trustworthy, that is circular reasoning. We should trust X person's assertions, because they are on Wikipedia as a trustworthy person. And they are on Wikipedia as a trustworthy person because we can trust their assertions.
 * Additionally the "independent analysts and commentators" featured in that article are all entertainment, television, and mass-media journalists. These people are not qualified to speak on the scientific accuracy of the show's substantive assertions. Second, even if they were, they are only speaking the the show's content in general, not this specific episode. Therefore, even if they were qualified to speak to the scientific accuracy of the content, they're not specifically endorsing the data you want to cite, so that's irrelevant. Broad praise towards the overall reporting in a show does not render any given point in any given episode an incontrovertible fact.
 * As for your contention that Last Week Tonight sometimes includes citations for some of their claims; the video you want to use does not cite all but a handful of their factual assertions, and the few that are cited at all are not to Wikipedia's standards, so I find that contention moot. Even if every other John Oliver video has cited all their claims perfectly, this one doesn't, so it's not really relevant.
 * The same problems arise for the second author. Again, it doesn't really matter if the narrator is well-known and their team is credited. That's not what determines what facts and statistics we rely on. Being well-known does not prevent you from ever possibly lying or misunderstanding something.
 * You correctly point out that the Wendover video does list a bibliography for their claims. I'm all for using those sources, if they are relevant and necessary. They seem to be from reputable sources with good controls. But what need do we have for an amateur reporter's retelling of those facts? Are we really including as one of the most important things this article needs one particular youtuber's retelling of the facts? Why cannot we include the facts as they lie, incorporate them as necessary, and present the sources themselves? The youtuber is more or less just retelling what the facts say in different words; not substantively adding or deviating from them with research of their own. We should not be relying on the reputation of a youtuber compiling sources, we should turn to the sources themselves and the reliability of the institutions producing them.
 * So in short, I'm all for incorporating any and all relevant sources those two youtube videos talk about. The youtube videos themselves, however, are not substantive, scholarly, or reliable enough to be worth citation to directly. Happy to discuss it further, though, if needed. BabbleOnto (talk) 06:19, 29 March 2024 (UTC)

Intro lacking citations
In the final paragraph of the intro, it says "These immigrants also disproportionately commit more crimes then legal citizens" but there appears to be no citation for this and the footnotes actually cite the opposite. Why is this allowed in here? 2601:152:981:54B0:58EC:8347:27A9:148A (talk) 21:35, 12 February 2024 (UTC)


 * "The footnotes actually cite the opposite". Which footnote? What pages in the footnotes you mean? Jc3s5h (talk) 22:06, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
 * I see that the material in question has been added to and reorganized in the last few days. I've removed the changes because it seems to go from saying that critics of immigration make certain claims, to saying the claims are true. Jc3s5h (talk) 22:23, 12 February 2024 (UTC)