by the way, erika, i just want to say that i hope you do not take my attack on your ideas as an attack on you. i don’t even know you, and even though i feel you are wrong about the specifics of whether it is the border or the people that are moving, perhaps because of personal biases you have, i can’t make much of a statement about your worth as a person.

you are probably a great young lady with a bright future. but it has always been my hope that, at least some of the time, this blog could be a source of facts and new information to people.

consider: if the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo never happened, and if mexico (rather than the US) developed the american southwest, would it be as prosperous as is now, or would it be like northern mexico (where people are unhappy with the lack of jobs or high wages)?

i realize the comment you left the other day was very heartfelt, and so you have probably taken my criticism of it personally. i hope you will not feel that i dislike you as a human being. in the past i have helped many, many illegal immigrants and children of immigrants with their legal problems out of a sense of compassion and obligation, even though i do not agree that sneaking across my nation’s border is justified.

While you can argue about how much crime they commit once they are here, the inescapable fact that you and others do not address is the violation of an international border and ensuing residency to which there is no entitlement.

Spare me the afterthoughts of your “crime statistics” (which Travis rather extensively refutes) and recognize the fundamental existence and purpose of international boundaries.

Studies on illegals are harder to come by.

jiminy, i wonder why that is? presumably our difficulty in conducting these studies correlates to the difficulty of placing entry stamps on illegal immigrants’ passports.

Travis does what the media does every day, and that is take one data point

yes, when added up, these rapes, murders, child molestations, and drug smugglings barely equal one single data point. you’d think faux news would stop reporting this stuff, but then again, it keeps happening.

fortunately for us, dees dem tings is minor. what i aiun’t gonna stand fer is dis here price of mah lettuce going up ten cent a head if all dem der mexican folk disdapearded.

Travis does what the media does every day, and that is take one data point

does this sound like a single data point-issue: the cop killer made up a name and birth date to give the cops (because he had multiple felonies and a deportation on his record) and the fake name and fake DOB combination turned up a criminal conviction. i mean, what are the chances of that (unless there are lots of data points to pick from)?

The man didn’t have identification but gave officers a name and birth date that Erfle ran through a police computer. That search turned up a misdemeanor warrant for shoplifting out of Tucson.

Police would later find out the man hadn’t given his real name. Martinez likely used an alias because he was trying to hide the fact he had felony warrants for aggravated assault and false imprisonment

see also immigrationshumancost.org for about 100 data points (unfortunately, the “fuzzy-wuzzy” murder stories don’t fit on one page, so you will have to scroll down the page, data point by data point).

in any case, my argument isn’t dependent on the claim that “illegal immigrants commit more crimes than americans.” my argument is that US immigration should be regulated so we can prevent the entry of criminals and scumbags like erik martinez. if there is no regulation, then we don’t know who is coming here. in the future please address the merits of that argument, not your caricature of an ignorant american who happens to speak differently than you.

when you look at communities with high illegal populations, they all have lower crime rates than native-born populations.

lower reported crime rates, perhaps. please see the CIS article, Immigrant Crime as an Underestimated Problem: Evidence and Practical Considerations. therein, the authors suggest many plausible reasons why immigrant crime statistics are hard to estimate (from underreporting by other immigrant victims, cultural barriers to reporting like beliefs about intra-family crime, “commuter” crime, crimes in which nationality of the perpetrator is not reported, and crimes carried out by the children of immigrants:

During the period 1979-86 Hispanics failed to report crimes of all types at a rate nearly twice the rate that they did report; even for violent crimes alone the unreported offenses outnumbered the reported ones. The violent crime victimization rate for Hispanics also exceeded that for non-Hispanics, 39.6 versus 35.3 offenses per 1,000 households, with household crime (burglary, larceny, vehicle theft) showing the greatest discrepancy, 265.6 versus 204.5 crimes per 1,000 households.

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The Mexican Commute: Yet another reason for underreporting lies in the fact that criminals from other countries, almost inevitably Mexico, cross over the border to commit crime and then return home to escape prosecution. Police officials in the San Diego area have complained that organized groups from Mexico cross over from Tijuana and commit robberies in middle-income neighborhoods. Indeed, criminal activity along the U.S.-Mexican border in San Diego County led local officials in the 1980s to conduct a study of arrest rates according to legal status. In the City of San Diego 26 percent of all burglary arrests and 12 percent of all felony arrests involved illegal aliens, who are estimated to comprise less than 4 percent of the total city population.36

Incomplete Record-Keeping: Immigrant crime also may be underestimated because local law enforcement officials do not keep records on the national origin of the perpetrator. In Dana Point, an affluent Orange County, Calif., coastal community experiencing a wave of immigrant-related crime, a sheriff’s officer noted that in a recent year that suburb had three murders, three rapes, 232 vehicle burglaries, 181 residential burglaries, and 108 commercial burglaries. Asked whether he had an ethnic breakdown on these numbers, he replied, “We won’t touch that.”37 That kind of local policy, especially in larger cities, explains why data based on the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports can explain only so much. While UCR Index is consistent across U.S. cities, and takes account of the most serious offenses, it doesn’t measure drug dealing, simple assaults, fraud, vandalism, and weapons violations, among other crimes. Nor given the reluctance of localities to break down crimes by race and ethnicity, does it collect data on that basis either. Butcher and Piehl admit, “Using the UCR may cause us to overlook some important types of crime.”

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The Second Generation

Even if immigrants are no more prone to commit crimes than are citizens, this tendency may not necessarily hold true for their offspring, who are American-born or at least residents of the U.S. from early childhood. Criminologists in this country long have theorized that the second, more than the first, generation of an immigrant population is likely to drift into crime.

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Waters is pessimistic that police can do much, beyond traditional means of law enforcement, to stem second-generation youth crime, as it is rooted primarily in the parent-child relationships that prevail within a given national culture. So long as youthful crime is foremost a product of a high-birthrate community, policies to acculturate such a community, will make only modest inroads into reducing crime. “The only way to ‘control’ youthful crime in immigrant groups,” Waters notes, “is to adopt policies that are inconsistent with a modern economy or to control/segregate immigrants in a fashion inconsistent with the basic principles of civil rights. This could include limiting the immigration of spouses…I must reluctantly conclude that little can be done to prevent outbreaks of youthful crime among immigrant populations.”

Seeing as how we’re talking about illegal immigrants, you propose a foolish point.

Studies on illegals are harder to come by. But when you look at communities with high illegal populations, they all have lower crime rates than native-born populations. Crime rates for immigrant have been historically lower than for natives.

The point is, Travis does what the media does every day, and that is take one data point, and spend about ten paragraphs telling a dramatic, “dem der Mexican folk takin’ mah country” story.

Most studies out there say Mexicans have lower crime rates than whites.

Seeing as how we’re talking about illegal immigrants, you propose a foolish point.