But what about the indiscriminate killing of human beings? Here in the United States, we have become so used to seeing stories on television, or reading about people being murdered that we have almost become immune to any sort of reaction at all.
One of my readers made the comment that when Cecil the lion was killed, the world seemed to forget that an undocumented immigrant, one who had been deported a number of times in the past, had killed a woman in San Francisco, and the news media had seemingly let the story go to the wayside, like it wasn’t important anymore.
Perhaps the reader has a good point, especially with the political rhetoric swirling around GOP candidates regarding illegal, or to be politically correct, undocumented immigrants. I have discovered there are two trains of thought on the matter of crimes being committed by undocumented immigrants.
The hard-line anti-undocumented immigrant stance
There is the Donald Trump camp, and perhaps we can add Governor Rick Perry to this camp. These people say illegal immigrants commit a huge number of crimes in this country. Let’s see, Perry told Glenn Beck in an interview on July 17, 2014, “the number of illegal activities up to and including homicides–I think over 3,000 homicides by illegal aliens over the course of the last six years; that’s unacceptable and that’s the reason that we have to secure that border.” The only problem with Perry’s statistics? They were sort of off the cuff and off the mark. They were unsubstantiated.
Everyone following the mob of GOP candidates knows what Donald Trump thinks about illegal immigration. Of course, he says they are all coming from Mexico, right? His words, to be exact, were, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said. “They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
The pro-immigration stance has the studies to back them up
There have been untold numbers of studies on immigrants and their integration into American society. And immigration advocates will tell us that it is a documented fact that “the crime rate among first-generation immigrants — those who came to this country from somewhere else — is significantly lower than the overall crime rate and that of the second generation,” says Pew Research on July 2, 2015.
Of course this won’t matter to those who are totally against immigrants, but a study published by Northwestern University in 2014 found there was no correlation between immigrants and violent crime. Another study, done by the California prison system in 2008 showed that “Immigrants are underrepresented in California prisons compared to their representation in the overall population.”
The crime rate in the United States is ridiculously high, but don’t blame illegal aliens
Unauthorized immigrants, or 11.2 million people, make up less than four percent of the entire U.S. population. According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 177,960 undocumented immigrants who were convicted criminals were deported last year. This number is 56 percent of all undocumented immigrants deported in 2014.
Looking at the above figures would give someone the idea that all those deported immigrants had committed some serious crimes while in this country. That is not altogether true because the definition of “criminal alien” is somewhat misleading, according to a report issued by iCE.
“Immigrants who experience even the slightest brush with the criminal justice system, such as being convicted of a misdemeanor, can find themselves subject to detention for an undetermined period, after which they are expelled from the country and barred from returning,” the report says. “In other words, for years the government has been redefining what it means to be a ‘criminal alien,’ using increasingly stringent definitions and standards of ‘criminality’ that do not apply to U.S. citizens.”
The actual number of undocumented immigrants who were released from custody between 2010 and 2014, and who later were charged with murder comes to 121 people. This figure is about a thousandth of one percent of the total number of illegal immigrants in this country today.
The U.S. has 4.4 percent of the world’s population and 22 percent of its prison population
Many readers may have heard this startling fact, not only from Hillary Clinton but from Sen. Rand Paul, also. Some people may be thinking the numbers have been fabricated, but it is a fact. As of July 4, 2014, with a population of 319 million people, the U.S. accounted for 4.4 percent of the world’s population of 7.1 billion people.
As far as the U.S. prison population goes, the figures are based on the go-to publication called the World Prison Population List, published by the UK -based International Center for Prison Studies. According to the latest addition, in 2013 there are 10.2 million people incarcerated in prisons throughout the world.
According to the WPPL, there were 2.24 million people behind bars in the U.S. This accounts for 22 percent of the world’s prison population. Out of that number, 73,665 inmates in state and federal prisons are not U.S. citizens. This amounts to about five percent of the total prison population in this country.
Many people might wonder at who is doing all the killing on our streets, especially if its obviously not illegal immigrants. Perhaps we might look at Chicago, Baltimore, New York and a few other cities, just to see if any illegals are hiding in some back alleys.
