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Thursday, July 9, 2015

So Is Trump Wrong?

Set aside for the moment your personal feelings about Donald Trump and/or the party whose nomination for the presidency he seeks. Set aside any squeamishness you might have at hearing something said that may sound even faintly un-PC. Set aside for a moment, too, Mr. Trump's inartful imprecision and, like Supreme Court Justices contemplating Obamacare, consider just what he meant to say and not what he actually did say. Then reflect objectively on this question: In what sense is the following Trump statement wrong:
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.
His comment and subsquent follow-ups have created a media feeding frenzy as well as difficulties for other GOP candidates who want to talk about almost anything other than Donald Trump and immigration. One of the problems Trump has created for the GOP is that voters who have yearned for someone in politics to say unapologetically, without deferential genuflections to political correctness, exactly what they mean are giving Trump a second look, and he's sucking all the media attention away from everyone else (Not that Hillary minds not having any media attention on her, though).

So, the question is in what extent, if any, was Trump right? Breitbart has done some homework and here's what they've turned up
While illegal immigrants account for about 3.5 percent of the U.S population, they represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences in FY 2014 following criminal convictions, according to U.S. Sentencing Commission data obtained by Breitbart News.

According to FY 2014 USSC data, of 74,911 sentencing cases, citizens accounted for 43,479 (or 58.0 percent), illegal immigrants accounted for 27,505 (or 36.7 percent), legal immigrants made up 3,017 (or 4.0 percent), and the remainder (about 1 percent) were cases in which the offender was either extradited or had an unknown status.

Broken down by some of the primary offenses, illegal immigrants represented 16.8 percent of drug trafficking cases, 20.0 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking, 74.1 percent of drug possession, 12.3 percent of money laundering, and 12.0 percent of murder convictions.

One GOP aide expressed shock at the numbers, emailing Breitbart News, “These statistics blew me away, and they blow a hole through the oft-repeated line that people only want to come to America to work. It’s tragic so few politicians are willing even to acknowledge the true extent of this problem, but until more do, more Americans will keep getting harmed.”

The USSC data only deals with federal offenders sentenced under the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 (SRA) and does not include other categories like state cases, death penalty cases, or “cases initiated but for which no convictions were obtained, offenders convicted for whom no sentences were yet issued, and offenders sentenced but for whom no sentencing documents were submitted to the Commission.”

The data does include immigration violations, of which illegal immigrants represented by far the greatest number of cases: 91.6 percent, or (20,333 cases), out of a total 22,204 cases.

Eliminating all immigration violations, illegal immigrants would account for 13.2 percent of all the offenders sentenced in FY14 following federal criminal convictions — still greater than the 3.5 percent of the population illegal immigrants are said to make up.
The Washington Post, citing data from 2010, protests that the vast majority of illegals are not felons, but I'm not sure how to interpret that. The vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but there are an awful lot who are.

In any case, every one of those crimes committed by an illegal alien, particularly those having been deported multiple times and harbored in "sanctuary cities," every one of the murders committed by an illegal alien and the heartbreak and grief suffered by the victim's families at the loss of their loved one, is on the hands of those politicians, including most prominently the President of the United States, who refuse to enforce our border and immigration laws.