In Brief: The Truth About Illegal-Alien Criminality
Do illegal aliens actually commit fewer crimes than do legal American citizens?
After an illegal alien murdered Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student in Georgia, Democrats have turned on the spin machine to claim that there’s no correlation between immigration and crime. The Leftmedia “fact-checkers” swarmed Donald Trump every time he claimed there was a connection because there’s no national database to track it. But they were AWOL when a Democrat mayor denied any connection.
So, John Perazzo at FrontPageMag decided to look into it.
Democrat defenders of open-borders immigration policies and their allies in the media have long claimed that illegal aliens make wonderful neighbors who, per capita, commit significantly fewer crimes against persons and property than do native-born American citizens. …
But common sense alone should tell us that people who blithely ignore American immigration laws are likely to disrespect federal, state and local laws as well.
For starters, that includes felonies like “forgery, fraud, identity theft, and perjury” so that they can get jobs or do other basic things in life. But there’s more.
The crimes of illegal aliens also include a multitude of violent, bloody, highly destructive offenses. And this is by no means a new phenomenon. In 2005, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report that looked at the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens who had “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 illegals had been arrested 459,614 times — an average of 8.3 arrests apiece — and had committed almost 700,000 separate criminal offenses, or roughly 12.7 offenses each. Approximately 12 percent of their arrests were for violent crimes such as homicide, robbery, assault, and sex-related offenses; 15 percent were for property offenses like burglary, larceny, theft, and vandalism; 24 percent were for drug crimes; and the rest were for a wide array of transgressions like DUI, fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, weapons violations, immigration crimes, and obstruction of justice.
Between 2003 and 2009, illegals in the U.S. committed approximately 70,000 sex crimes, 42,000 robberies, 81,000 auto thefts, 95,000 weapons offenses, and 213,000 assaults. During that same period, some 115,717 murders were committed nationwide, of which 25,064 were carried out by “criminal aliens.”
In 2009, a total of 295,959 criminal aliens were incarcerated in state jails and prisons across the United States. Approximately 227,600 of them — or 77 percent — were in the U.S. illegally. And the crimes they committed were very often serious.
Perazzo recounts stats from Texas, which does the work most states won’t to track such crime data. But from other sources, he collects data about several states struggling with illegal immigration.
Between 2008 and 2014, criminal aliens were responsible for 38 percent of all murder convictions in California, Texas, Arizona, Florida and New York, though illegals were only 5.6% of the total population in those states.
He also makes a critical point that Democrats use to muddy the issue:
Many studies of the relationship between immigrants and crime fail to distinguish between illegal aliens and their legal immigrant counterparts. Instead, they conflate the two and categorize them generically as “immigrants.”
And then there’s the most critical point of all:
Every statistic about illegal immigrant crime represents a real victim whose life may be permanently ruined, if not ended altogether, by people possessing no legal right to even set foot on American soil.
And many of those aliens wouldn’t be here if Joe Biden would enforce immigration laws.
- Tags:
- crime
- immigration
- John Perazzo