Trump, Angel Families And Illegal-Alien Crime

The Donald’s timing was perfect given the hysterics about children “separated” from border-jumping parents, not least the media’s lie about the little girl in the photograph. On Friday, he reminded the worthies of the media and real Americans in the room that illegal aliens “permanently separate” too many Americans from their families by killing them.

Naturally, The New York Times fact-checked Trump, and published a story under this headline: “Trump Highlights Immigrant Crime to Defend His Border Policy. Statistics Don’t Back Him Up.”

As the Times reported:

According to a 2017 report from the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, 1.53 percent of native-born Americans are incarcerated, compared with 0.85 percent of undocumented immigrants and 0.47 percent of legal immigrants.

The Marshall Project, in a 2018 analysis of data from 200 metropolitan areas over the last few decades, found that crime has fallen despite the immigrant population increasing. Other studies have found that the immigration has little effect on crime.

The problem? Cato’s numbers, its authors admit and one critic noted, guess at the number of illegal aliens incarcerated in state and local facilities. Furthermore, the study ignored the multiple, unpunished felonies the “vast majority of illegal aliens” commit by faking documents to get jobs and public benefits meant for citizens. Thus, Cato was flatly wrong. The second tendentious report from the leftist Marshall Project doesn’t confine itself to crime by illegal aliens, Trump’s subject, but instead considers on crime by all immigrants.

Let’s not say that leftist academics and the media conflate the two to bend the data, but instead observe that the Times did not mention the following facts from the federal Government Accountability Office, conveniently assembled in one place by Hans A. von Spakovsky of The Heritage Foundation.

According to a recent Associated Press article, “multiple studies have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born U.S. citizens.” But the issue isn’t non-citizens who are in this country legally. ...

[T]he Government Accountability Office released two unsettling reports in 2005 on criminal aliens who are in prison for committing crimes in the United States, and issued an updated report in 2011.

The first report (GAO-05-337R) found that criminal aliens (both legal and illegal) make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners. Yet according to the Center for Immigration Studies, non-citizens are only about nine percent of the nation’s adult population. Thus, judging by the numbers in federal prisons alone, non-citizens commit federal crimes at three times the rate of citizens.

The findings in the second report (GAO-05-646R) are even more disturbing. This report looked at the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens that “entered the country illegally and were still illegally in the country at the time of their incarceration in federal or state prison or local jail during fiscal year 2003.” Those 55,322 illegal aliens had been arrested 459,614 times, an average of 8.3 arrests per illegal alien, and had committed almost 700,000 criminal offenses, an average of roughly 12.7 offenses per illegal alien. ...

The 2011 GAO report wasn’t much different. It looked at 251,000 criminal aliens in federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Those aliens were arrested nearly 1.7 million times for close to three million criminal offenses. Sixty-eight percent of those in federal prison and 66 percent of those in state prisons were from Mexico. Their offenses ranged from homicide and kidnapping to drugs, burglary, and larceny.

But suppose the Times and Cato and the left are correct; i.e., that immigrants as a group, legal status regardless, commit fewer crimes than Americans. One truth remains: The victims who stood by Trump wouldn’t be victims if the illegals hadn’t been here.

An illegal alien shouldn’t be here even if his only offense is crossing the border. That’s the point.

That illegals often rob, rape and murder only sharpens it.

R. Cort Kirkwood

R. Cort Kirkwood