There was a point where President Trump and his trade advisers suggested he wanted a world with “zero tariffs, zero barriers, zero subsidies.” Cato experts argued at the time that these stated objectives contravened statements the President made over the course of decades, and at any rate the President’s actions were unlikely to achieve these objectives. President Trump’s trade policy has been protectionist, abusive of the constitutional separation of powers, destructive to U.S. alliances, and fundamentally flawed as a strategy to achieve its stated goals.
Immigrant criminality is an important public policy concern because some American voters believe that illegal immigrants have a higher crime rate than American citizens. Updated research from Cato scholar Alex Nowrasteh uses Texas Department of Public Safety data to measure the rate at which individuals were convicted and arrested by crime and immigration status in Texas in 2017. The results show that in Texas in 2017, illegal immigrants were 47 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans and legal immigrants were about 65 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime than native-born Americans.
