Canard about illegals committing fewer crimes than other Americans gets blown apart from DHS data

A common leftist canard, promoted by activists, foundations, Democrat politicians, Catholic bishops, Episcopalian bishops, and other open-borders advocates, holds that illegal aliens commit way fewer crimes than ordinary Americans.

It's sugar-coated garbage, and not just because we look around and confront the evidence of our own eyes, or consider the incentive an open border offers to criminals who can't get into the states otherwise.

Writing at the New York Post, John Lott has come up with a doozy of a report showing how data are skewed to conceal the fact that illegals commit at least three times the crime of ordinary Americans and those legally present, putting paid to the rubbish that crime from illegals is minimal, any illegal-alien crime in the news is just an aberration, and anyone thinking otherwise is just a MAGA racist xenophobe.

Lott points out that the baseline mistake for these claims is that official data lumps legal and illegal immigrants together. Separate them out, and vetted legal immigrants commit very few crimes -- but illegals commit way more than they are given 'credit' for by the open-borders lobby.

Citing DHS data for New York alone, Lott writes:

The DHS data gives us a handy metric to calculate relative rates of criminality.
Altogether, roughly 50,803 people are incarcerated in New York’s prison and jail systems: 32,469 in the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, and another 18,334 in the state’s city and county jails.
The 7,113 illegal aliens currently incarcerated thus make up 14% of New York’s total inmate population — and this share is likely an underestimate, because the state doesn’t actively identify immigration status.
But assume the DHS data is correct, and illegals make up 14% of incarcerated individuals in New York.

New York is estimated to have between 676,000 and 825,000 illegal aliens out of a total state population of 19.99 million — meaning illegal immigrants make up only 3.4% to 4.15% of the state’s population. That means they are overrepresented in the state’s prisons and jails by at least 3.4 times. And even if the population estimate undercounts the number of illegal aliens in New York, and the true number present is two to three times higher, illegal aliens would still be massively overrepresented among New York’s convicted and accused criminals.

There are probably many more times illegal acts are committed by illegals such as driving without driver licenses and/or auto liability insurance, dumping garbage in country lanes, breaking single family home zoning ordinances by jamming multiple families or unrelated persons in a single family residence zone, avoiding paying taxes, concealing income to qualify for benefits, etc., etc. Once you have a class of people to whom the laws are a matter of convenience rather than requirement, you are looking at rampant unlawful activity and an attitude of disdain for those who follow the laws.

“dumping garbage in country lanes”

Victor D Hanson tells incredible stories of the garbage he finds in his orchard in Selma, CA. Junk, garbage, old appliances, wild dogs...you name it. He says it is always dumped by our friends from south of the border.

In our South Bay town (San Francisco Peninsula), I regularly see piles of dirt and cut-up trees dumped along side the Expressways (essentially 4-lane freeways with dividers, but with some traffic lights). There are always wide turnouts every mile or two and, more often than not, they are filled with dumped materials. The loads are big and dumped by large dump trucks. In decades, I’ve never read an explanation of who dumps it. Waste disposal fees in the Bay Area are beyond obscene (you can’t even drive into a dump for less than $100 now), so there are huge incentives for crooked contractors to just dump their waste on the side of the road. I figure it’s unlicensed contractor firms owned by illegals. Who licensed contractor would run the risk of losing their contractor’s license?

The cost to bring in equipment to haul away their wast must be enmosrmous and it’s only done once or twice a year. Between times, there are these unsightly huge piles of waste along our Expressways.

As you point out, these are the hidden costs of illegal immigration.

official data lumps legal and illegal immigrants together.
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Yes, most of legal immigrants are vetted, and are somewhat chosen from their skills and morals. (should be 100% that way!)
They are also aware that committing crimes can get them out of here.
On the flip side, the illegals have already committed crime to getting here, they do not care.
And, if they were clean as lily, they could probably get here legally.

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