A Year Later, Immigration Scare Claims Debunked

A year ago today, Theo Lock wrote of the illegal immigration “crisis”:

From time to time our more conservative visitors ask us why we don’t cover the “fact” that America is facing a flood of illegal immigrants, or why we don’t cover the “fact” of an explosion in violence by illegal immigrants on America’s borders.

The reason we don’t cover these “facts” is that we cannot find any indication that they are actually, really, facts at all….

While conservatives are complaining that the number of new Border Patrol isn’t high enough for their tastes, there are more border patrol agents, and there is more funding for them, than in the past. Yet with more agents looking, and looking harder, to find illegal immigrants, fewer have been found in the U.S. in recent years. And there is no crime wave sweeping the border states (by the way, although state-by-state information is not yet available, preliminary data for 2004 show a decrease in violent crimes in the West, compared to 2003).

As a member of the reality-based community, I am always ready to change my mind when confronted with a new set of documented facts (please note, unsupported allegations do not count). That said, it doesn’t look to me as though the border region is suffering from any kind of new crime wave, or illegal immigration wave, or anything like that. In fact, the statistics seem to indicate that the situation is actually improving.

To my eye, this looks like a classic scare.

In response, a character named “Hoosier Texan” cut and pasted in the following claim, trying to pass it off as his own. Among a wide variety of irrelevant and flat false claims sat two (or one?) doozies:

8. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

9. In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.

Notice that the frisky fella hit “paste” twice. Theo responded:

DUBIOUS SOURCE
==============
#8 and #9 are direct quotes plagiarized from Heather Mac Donald, (a fellow of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative publicity outfit) without attribution. Do you have the original data source for these claims so we can check them? If you do not, what are you doing posting this single claim as two claims?…

Some of your stats seem to be without any sort of corroborating source beyond conservative-funded echo chamber outfits. Show me the source data. I’m sure you must know where it is, because surely you wouldn’t just repeat sound bites from the conservative echo chamber, right? You speak of me spinning, but you’re projecting: spin is unsubstantiated echo-chamber-repeating claims. If you want to avoid the spin, show me the source data.

I simply ask that when someone (in this case, YOU) asks me to get hysterical about something, they provide me actual, sourced facts to back up their request for me to get hysterical. Otherwise, I’m just not going to drink the Kool-Aid.

Again you project your own insecurities: you’re the one who is insulting my intelligence by thinking I’ll swallow undocumented claims, irrelevant information and racist ideology.

If you want to convince me, you’re going to have to do better than that. Either you will or you won’t. It’s up to you … so stop whining about it.

Hoosier Texan, eager to keep up the anti-immigrant scare he had copied from someone else, got quickly defensive:

Spinning, you spin the entire point during your article. You don’t like sources that are institues with conservative leanings? Does that mean they dummy their numbers?… Yes, there are statistics out there Theo. And until I see some credibly ones contrary to I have found, your argument holds no water and resembles an ostrich with it’s head in the sand.

Theo persisted:

repeat:

Tell me from what data set your “statistics” originally come from. Give me a citation so I can check them out, just like I gave you a citation so you could check my sources of data out. If you had, you’d have known that 2003 is the last year for which the sort of data I reported on is available.

I’m not an ostrich with my head in the sand. I’m looking at the most recently available public data. Eyes open.

It’s standard practice to ask for what I’m asking. You shouldn’t be confident in the numbers you rattle off if you don’t know where the numbers originally come from. If you know where the numbers originally come from, you shouldn’t have a problem giving me a citation to them so I can check out the data source myself.

It’s that simple. Please don’t stall any more.

Hoosier Texan didn’t supply the original data source. Theo asked again the next day:

Hoosier Texan, could you identify the particular datasets from which you drew your statistics?

And then Hoosier Texan really started to steam:

Theo, quit stalling yourself. Quit asking for this that and the other and answer to the topic. You already know where I got the numbers and they are the most recent out there…unlike the conclusion you draw from two year old information….

I haven’t been able to check the rest because I had too many windows open.

So just brush it off Theo when you lose an argument. Typical tatic of the left. Your backed into a corner becaue your called out for not reporting ALL the data you find, you ask for more of this or that yourself to try to create a smoke screen of doubt and declare your done.

Theo, you are EXACTLY what is wrong with both the left and the right!

Ralph chimed in:

You haven’t been able to verify the claims you made because you “had too many windows open?”

That’s the lamest excuse I ever heard.

Go close some windows and do your homework.

Hoosier continued to stonewall on the original data source for this claim:

HT, I don’t see you being able to argue or prove anything wrong I have said. No one has made any type of logical argument against what I have found….

And all I see from you is some little side kick that chimes in and says “Yeah, that’s right,” or “See, I told you so” and you don’t do any reasearch yourself. You just eat up everything that is espoused on this board and take it for granted. You, as well as Theo and others, ignore speaking to facts when you can’t as well. So to accuse me of going silent when you think I have lost is the pot calling the kettle black.

And that was the last we heard from Hoosier Texan on the thread. He never came back to identify his original data source, only surfacing a little while later to blackmail Irregular Times with the threat of posting false personal information about a nonexistent 401(k) plan he imagined existed. Truly bizarre. But notice throughout the whole thread of discussion that Hoosier Texan is doing the jolly conservative dance. He would say anything, do anything but actually provide the data source for the fishy-smelling factual claim (plagiarized from Heather Mac Donald) that “In Los Angeles, 95 percent of all outstanding warrants for homicide (which total 1,200 to 1,500) target illegal aliens. Up to two-thirds of all fugitive felony warrants (17,000) are for illegal aliens.”

Exactly one year later, I finally found out why. From a column by Linda Chavez (who, mind you, is a Reagan Republican, not a member of what Hoosier Texan would have called “the Loony Left”):

Facts are stubborn things, unfortunately not nearly as stubborn as factoids. And nowhere do factoids trump facts more frequently than in the immigration debate. The latest example comes from Pat Buchanan in his new book, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, where Buchanan regurgitates factoids ad nauseam, all with the purpose of blaming Mexicans for just about everything wrong with America.

The problem is, some of Buchanan’s “facts” are mere factoids. Let’s take one of the most stubborn factoids to emerge in the immigration debate, one that Buchanan cites as do other commentators: 95 percent of all the outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles, which total 1,200-1,500, are for illegal aliens.

Sounds pretty damning, that is until you try to pin down where it came from and what it means.

I’ve been tracking this particular factoid for a while, since it crops up over and over again, and I’ve even exchanged e-mails with the source, Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute. In 2004, Mac Donald wrote an article for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, “The Illegal Alien Crime Wave,” in which she first used this statistic.

The problem is, the Los Angeles Police Department doesn’t collect information on the immigration status of criminals, much less suspects, so there is no database of how many illegal aliens are wanted on outstanding homicide warrants. When I asked Mac Donald to provide her source, she said, “The LAPD fugitive warrants section gave me that figure.” I don’t doubt Mac Donald’s word — she is an old friend. Someone, Mac Donald won’t say who, undoubtedly gave her this misinformation. This particular factoid has been debunked by several sources, including The Los Angeles Times and Snopes.com, but it just won’t die.

We know why this factoid just won’t die: it’s spread by anti-immigrant fearmongers like Hoosier Texan, on forums just like this. But wait, it gets better. Chavez hunts down some actual statistics with, you know, some real sources and stuff:

University of California professor Ruben Rumbaut, an expert on immigration and crime, looked at 2000 Census data on the institutionalized population in the United States, most of whom are in prisons, and came up with these astonishing facts. Immigrants are far less likely to be in jail or prison than other U.S. residents (the database covers federal, state, county and local prisons and jails).

Of the U.S. population of 45.2 million men ages 18-39 (those most likely to be in the criminal population), 3 percent were incarcerated, or about 1.3 million at the time of the 2000 Census. Only .7 percent of Mexican-born males were in prison or jail, compared with 3.51 percent of all U.S.-born males, which includes 1.71 percent of non-Hispanic whites, 11.6 percent of blacks and 5.9 percent of Mexican Americans.

But these facts have yet to banish the factoid that immigrants commit more crimes than the native born. And you can bet that demagogues like Buchanan will continue to ignore the facts and repeat the factoids.

Theo’s bullshit detector was working.

Back when I lived in Durham, NC, a family of migrants from Mexico lived next door, and they just weren’t as nice as my other neighbors. No. They were nicer, always bringing over extra food, saying nice things about how cute my kids were, bringing them Christmas gifts, talking about how we could peaceably resolve issues regarding our joint yards. It’s nice to see statistics that bear out my own personal experience about the kind integrity of Mexican immigrants. It’s a shame to think that politicians and other demagogues seeking to stoke fear of outsiders for nefarious purposes are going to keep right on shoveling loads of hateful bullshit down our traps.