The Problem With Downplaying Immigrant Crime by David Frum ( Jul 29, 2015 ) see note please
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/the-problem-with-downplaying-immigrant-crime/399905/
I do not like or respect Donald Trump….but it is wrong to demean America voters who support him…and this long column from the summer of 2015 explains why…..Now, if he would only shut up and go away with John Kasich….rsk
Donald Trump is a troubling figure. The voters (temporarily) surging to him are deluding themselves. But the politicians and media who want to blame Trump or his supporters can find the real culprit in their own mirrors.
Donald Trump has gained political traction by demagoguing on an issue more responsible leaders have neglected.
On July 5, the 32-year-old Steinle posed with her father for a photograph on a San Francisco pier at 6:30 on a Wednesday evening. Suddenly there was a pop. Steinle crumpled. She died in hospital two hours later.
The stunningly random killing left behind a devastated family—and a confessed killer: Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, an illegal immigrant from Mexico who had been convicted of seven previous felonies and five times been ordered deported from the United States.
It’s often remarked that Donald Trump appeals to angry voters. That’s surely true. Yet there is a delicate discomfort about mentioning exactly the issue those voters—at least, those Republican voters—say they are most angry about: the breakdown of immigration enforcement. Trump holds a 2-1 lead over Jeb Bush among Republicans who want an immigration policy that focuses on enforcement and deportation.
Many leading politicians have expressed concern over Kathryn Steinle’s sad death. They typically represent the crime as something aberrational. Hillary Clinton, for example, said that San Francisco authorities “made a mistake” when they released Lopez-Sanchez into the community. Jeb Bush said, “The system broke down for [Steinle] and her family, and you can see why people are upset about that.”
Trump, however, had already staked out a position that defined the Steinle killing as anything but aberrational. The system didn’t break down for Steinle. It functioned as it all too often does. As Senator Ted Cruz pointed out during a July 21 Judiciary Committee hearing on crimes by illegal immigrants, in 2014 alone, immigration authorities released into American communities 193 illegal immigrants with homicide convictions, 426 people with sexual-assault convictions and 16,000 with drunk-driving convictions. Altogether, 104,000 people who by law should have been deported were instead allowed to remain on American soil. The director of the agency in charge of the removals offered as a partial excuse that immigration courts faced a backlog of 500,000 cases.
In his June 16 announcement speech, three weeks before Steinle’s death, Trump seized the issue of crime by immigrants, especially immigrants from Mexico:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime.
They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people … But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.
Republican politicians condemned and repudiated Trump. Business partners severed their relationship with him. Former Texas governor Rick Perry called Trump a “cancer” on the Republican party, and Rupert Murdoch tweeted: “Mexican immigrants, as with all immigrants, have much lower crime rates than native born. Eg El Paso safest city in U.S. Trump wrong.”
Trump’s many critics have rightly denounced the reckless accusations by an apparently self-serving figure. Yet in their determination to quell Trump’s overheated rhetoric, Trump’s critics risk straying into an opposite and also dangerous error: denial of important facts that matter to many voters, but that awkwardly challenge the elite consensus on immigration policy.
Rupert Murdoch was by no means the only person to claim in the wake of the Steinle killing that immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than the native born. Yet this claim, while literally true, is much less reassuring than the claimants imagine, for four crucial reasons:
First, by any definition, unauthorized immigrants commit a lot of crimes.
- An estimated 25,000 of these undocumented immigrants serving sentences for homicide
- A cumulative total of 2.89 million offenses committed by these undocumented immigrants between 2003 and 2009 (although half a million of these were for immigration-related offenses)
- Among those offenses: An estimated 42,000 robberies, 70,000 sex crimes, 81,000 auto thefts, 95,000 weapons offenses, and 213,000 assaults
Second, crime by the unauthorized, like the population of illegal immigrants itself, appears to be disproportionately concentrated in border states. A Texas Department of Public Safety report obtained by the PJMedia estimated that the illegal immigrants in Texas prisons had committed a total of 2,993 homicides in a state that typically suffers between 1100 and 1400 homicides per year. After years of welcome decline, crime rates are rising in immigration hubs including Houston, Milwaukee, Phoenix, and San Diego.
Third, statistics on contemporary immigrant crime likely contain a downward bias. When most studies report that immigrants commit fewer crimes than natives, many rely—as I did above—on incarceration rates. Prison populations are the most authoritative source of data on immigrant crime. It’s much easier to assess the immigration status of a person in custody, after all.
But because U.S. prison sentences are so long, prisons house many people whose criminal activities occurred years, or even decades, in the past. Many of the people in prison today were sent there at a time when the foreign-born population was smaller and crime rates were higher. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that 20 percent of the U.S. prison population is foreign born. That does not imply that foreign-born persons are committing only 20 percent of crime right now. Yet that is how the statistic is often used.
When American elites debate immigration, they mostly ignore this, and instead debate its economic impact. But even the most favorable analysis concedes that the economic benefits of immigration to the native-born are exceedingly small: about 0.2 percent of GDP, in a computation frequently cited and endorsed by the Obama administration.
In return for those relatively meager economic benefits, the United States shoulders many serious and severe social costs, including the crimes tallied by the GAO.
Under different immigration rules, and a different enforcement regimen, Kathryn Steinle would still be alive. Under different immigration rules, many thousands of other crimes would have been prevented. Under different immigration rules, the average U.S. crime rate might be lower than it is today—and probably considerably lower than it will be in future.
What to do in the face of those truths is challenging and unobvious. But one thing should not be done: to leave it only to Donald Trump to speak them aloud.
In a democracy, it’s the job of citizens to identify problems—and the job of elites to devise solutions. Elections should be competitions between elite groupings as to whose solutions will prevail. Immigration is an issue on which American elites refuse to do their jobs. Voters are intensely divided over immigration; political and business elites are almost unanimously united. On voting day, citizens are offered no choice—which means that the elite decision carries no legitimacy, since citizens were never given an effective opportunity to choose something different. By joining in a policy cartel, elites discredit themselves.
Donald Trump is a troubling figure. The voters (temporarily) surging to him are deluding themselves. But the politicians and media who want to blame Trump or his supporters can find the real culprit in their own mirrors.
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