UnFAIR Deception

FAIR president Dan Stein has a website “Stein Report” that has been dispersing anti-immigrant hate and skewed statistics for years. This one really caught my eye today.

http://www.steinreport.com/archives/012757.html

Stein Report claims that an LA Times article spills the truth [sic] about illegal immigration and crime.

Studies from the early 20th century though today have almost unanimously found that immigrants in the U.S. have a lower crime rate than natives. The anti-immigrant fanatics have claimed that the studies lump legal and illegal immigrants together and that if data were available for illegal immigrants only it would surely show that illegal immigrants have a higher rate of crime than other groups. Nevertheless, no one has been able to come up with any data to prove this assumption.

Stein found a comment in the L.A. Times that he is trying to pass off as evidence that illegal immigrants have an unusually high inclination to commit crimes.

“Nationwide, about 12% of all inmates checked were here illegally and had prior criminal convictions.”

Stein flunky Jack Martin writes, “The significance of that statistic is that it demonstrates the disproportionate involvement of illegal and deportable aliens in crime.”

“… illegal aliens …appear to be jailed about three times their share of the population.”

JACKPOT!

Is it true? Could it be? Did they finally come up with proof that illegal aliens have a higher propensity to commit crimes?

Not necessarily.

The article was about a new program implemented by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) called Secure Communities. Secure Communities is a process for ICE to determine if an individual in local custody is a potentially removable criminal alien. The program checks the immigration status of inmates in local jails.

According to the Secure Communities website, ICE deploying the program across the nation beginning by focusing on sites that represent the highest concentrations of the most dangerous criminal aliens. The map below shows where the program is currently deployed and where they intend to expand it in the coming years.

http://www.ice.gov/secure_communities/deployment/

As one would expect, ICE is beginning this program in localities believed to have high concentrations of illegal aliens. Jurisdictions like Helena, Montana and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with low populations of immigrants, are not included.

So Stein Report takes crime data collected in communities that have high concentrations of illegal aliens and compares it to the percentage of illegal aliens nationwide and concludes that the data support the contention that illegal aliens have a higher propensity to commit crime.