It may not shock you to learn that the mainstream media of yesteryear lied about illegal immigration and crime.
The murder of Laken Riley has once again spurred debate. Riley, a 22-year-old University of Georgia student, was brutally murdered last month by an illegal immigrant from Venezuela.
When private citizens or organizations conduct research, they simply prove what they want to prove.
The media quickly pounced on it with familiar phrases like: This one From NPR, the publicly funded liberal mouthpiece: “Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, study finds.”
I’ve spent hours poring over government crime statistics. The FBI literally has a building with thousands of employees called the Criminal Justice Information Services Division dedicated to analyzing crime data. You can analyze crimes by perpetrator, victim, race, gender, age, LGBT status, weapon type, time of day, and more. Virtually all data except one bit.
No one across the U.S. government tracks the number of crimes committed by illegal aliens.
Isn’t it strange? They tallied the number of Pacific Islanders arrested for drunk driving on Saturday morning, but made no mention of the legal status of violent offenders. The truth is, it’s not weird at all. That’s willful ignorance.
Donald Trump sought to resolve this issue in his first days as president. He ordered the Secretary of Homeland Security and the Attorney General to “collect relevant data and submit quarterly reports on the immigration status of all incarcerated aliens” in federal, state, and local detention centers. issued an executive order instructing the government to do so.
Bureaucrats complied to some extent, but let us know In federal facilities, undocumented immigrants convicted of non-immigration offenses made up about 15% of the prisoners. Comparing this to Pew Research Center estimates that illegal aliens make up about 3% of the country’s population, the five-fold increase casts doubt on the idea that they are safe.
At the state level, where the vast majority of criminals are prosecuted, we still don’t know anything. In response to the executive order, the state turned over a trove of documents cataloging all “noncitizens,” which may include legal aliens residing or visiting here. Some states, such as New Mexico, ignore it completely. In fact, his 18.8% of California prisoners are “noncitizens.”
To fill this information gap, “experts” have come to the rescue, often giving us comically horrifying results.
Some studies are complete nonsense, but they all have their own purpose. When a private citizen or organization conducts research, they simply prove what they want to prove.
When the media wants to show that illegal immigrants don’t commit more crimes, one of the people they talk about is Alex Nowras of the Cato Institute, a libertarian, pro-illegal immigrant, and open borders advocate. His study found that “the homicide conviction rate for illegal immigrants in Texas in 2015 was slightly lower than the conviction rate for U.S. citizens.”
Except that Texas crime data only tracks undocumented immigrants who have already been arrested and fingerprinted by the Department of Homeland Security. Last I checked, illegal immigrants weren’t exactly lining up to be fingerprinted and recorded. This would have removed many illegal immigrants, but it is unlikely that he did this by chance. (For the record, Nowras has now corrected his mistake and says the numbers reach the same conclusion.)
Other research has led to this strange defense. washington post:
A comparison of Census and FBI data shows that from 1990 to 2013, the U.S. violent crime rate fell by almost half, while the number of illegal immigrants in the country tripled. . Nevertheless, the idea that immigrants bring crime persists.
Anyone who has studied basic statistics knows that correlation does not equal causation. In this country, ice cream sales and the number of assaults increase in the summer. But buying ice cream doesn’t mean you’ll be assaulted. And the fact that illegal immigration has increased while violent crime has decreased does not mean that one is equal to the other. Tough-on-crime mayors and governors, three-strike laws, and various other changes all happened around the same time.
But these ridiculous arguments were enough to fool almost the entire press corps with glee. After all, this is just another proof that Donald Trump is a horrible person™.
To know clearly whether there are fewer illegal immigrants committing crimes per capita, it is necessary to know the number of illegal immigrants who commit crimes.
We don’t know it because our government hides it. And the media is also an active accomplice.
