Im-Politic: The Last Gasps of Immigration Snake Oil?

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border security, Cheap Labor Lobby, crime, felons, Hillary Clinton, illegal immigrants, illegal immigration, Im-Politic, Immigration, Migration Policy Institute, Norman Matloff, Obama, Open Borders, Trump, Washington Post

What if someone told you and the rest of the country that Washington has just decided to admit into the country a large group of foreigners and that you knew for sure that 7.45 percent of them would be convicted for crimes and that more than a third of these (2.73 percent of the total) would be felony convictions. In absolute terms, this works out to 820,000 and 300,000 illegal residents, respectively.

If you have a lick of common sense, you’d be outraged. Yet this is the exactly the case with America’s illegal immigrant population in recent decades. Along with another news item I’ve just found, reveals just how completely and dangerously loony America’s immigration policy has become under the Open Borders-obsessed leaders of the last two administrations, and why at least from this standpoint, Donald Trump’s election as president was so urgently needed.

Supporters of more lenient immigration policies might respond that, compared with the U.S. population overall, illegal immigrants look even more law-abiding. A 2010 academic report, for example, claimed that a total of 8.6 percent of the adults in the United States has been convicted for a felony – more than three times the above rate for illegals. Moreover, the number of these felons is growing faster than the population as a whole, so the gap could well be even bigger today.

Yet here’s where you need to look at the numbers intelligently – and make sure you’re comparing apples versus apples. First, the Census Bureau counts illegal immigrants when it gauges the population every ten years. So illegal immigrant felons have been contributing to the overall numbers.

Second, the first illegal immigrant felon figures I provided were for the entire illegal population. The illegal immigrant felon figures are for adults illegally living in the country. According to a widely accepted source of information about the illegal population – the Pew Research Center – some 28 percent of this group is outside the nation’s workforce, meaning those Americans who either are working, or unemployed but looking for work. So we can safely assume that most of these illegals are either minors or seniors – demographic sectors where you don’t find many convicted felons.

When you do the math, it turns out that the share of illegal immigrant adults with felony convictions equals some 3.79 percent. That’s still considerably lower than the share for the total American population, but closer.

Here’s the rub, though, and it’s based on a crucial point raised recently by one of America’s best thinkers on immigration policy today, Professor Norman Matloff, a computer scientist at the University of California-Davis who specializes in both immigration and the U.S. high-tech workforce, and the Asian immigrant community in northern California.

As Matloff has noted, the purpose of American immigration policy is supposed to improve the country. As a result, why has Washington looked the over way for so long as literally millions of foreigners, including large numbers of undesirables, made their way into the country? Even worse, felons pose especially clear and present dangers to pubic safety. No wonder so many voters were outraged by the federal government’s record on this count.

In addition, all the figures I’ve provided for illegal immigrant crime rates come from the Migration Policy Institute. Its website specifies that it favors “rights-based immigration and refugee policies” – which raises an orange flag concerning its objectivity to me. And that orange flag should turn bright red for everyone after reading through its list of donors – which includes the hitherto immigration-friendly U.S. government, the Mexican government, the foundation run by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (a strong supporter of immigration policies that have undercut wages in the U.S. tech sector), and WalMart (a long-time pillar of the nation’s corporate cheap labor lobby). So it’s entirely possible that the real numbers for illegal immigrant felons are considerably higher.

Meanwhile, much stronger evidence for the abject failure of current American immigration policy comes from a new Washington Post report finding that “Central American families are flowing into the United States in growing numbers….” Not surprisingly, this Mainstream Media article tries to put the blame on Mr. Trump and his supporters:

“Trump has pledged to build a towering border wall and deport millions, proposals that have been sketched out so far only in broad terms.

“By winning the election, Trump may have inadvertently made his job even harder. His plans have become a selling point for the smugglers urging people to cross the border before a wall goes up, according to migrants and officials in the United States and Mexico.”

Even less surprisingly, the authors missed the real news here: Throughout his administration, President Obama has been making statements to the effect that “Overall, the border is less porous than it’s been any time since the 1970s.” So did Mr. Trump’s main general election opponent, Democrat Hillary Clinton. But as the Post article makes painfully obvious, both of them, as well as the Open Borders crowd generally, were blowing smoke.

Trump will no doubt face daunting obstacles towards keeping his immigration promises. But so far, it’s clear that none of them will involve the self-inflicted handicaps of cockeyed priorities and deliberately wishful thinking.

Following Up: Immigration Cheerleaders Keep Belittling the Illegal Alien Crime Issue

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crime, Donald Trump, Following Up, illegal aliens, illegal immigrants, Immigration, Kevin Drum, Migration Policy Institute, Mother Jones, Sanctuary Cities, Washington Post

Here I was all set to spend the morning finishing up a post that drills down on the new U.S. trade figures when I found myself caught up in a heated Twitter debate on the threats posed by illegal alien criminality. In this exchange, the “other side” repeated yet again a fundamental mistake of those who dismiss such talk as racism and xenophobia. Specifically, it used statistics that, as I’ve noted, some insightful immigration policy critics have explained are largely beside the point. But since I also committed a minor journalistic sin, it’s worth discussing these issues in detail.

It all began last night when I was reading over a new Washington Post editorial (predictably) slamming Donald Trump’s new immigration plan as a disaster. In the process, the Post argued that Trump’s deportation views (which as I reported were not contained in the plan itself but expressed in an interview televised on Sunday) made no sense because of the Republican presidential candidate’s promise to “bring them back rapidly, the good ones.” The editorial decried the illogic allegedly demonstrated by Trump by claiming that the vast majority of America’s current illegal population is law-abiding and otherwise upstanding. Therefore, deporting them only to let them promptly return would represent a huge and hugely economically disruptive waste of time and resources.

The Post has the logic right, as I see it. But what’s much stranger was the evidence it cited that “about 87 percent” of U.S. illegals “have no serious criminal record.” It’s strange – to say the least – because one of the paper’s main editorial writers on the subject, Charles Lane, has rejected the idea that illegal immigrant crime is “a real issue” (though he has acknowledged that the sanctuary city movement has gone too far). Yet now the paper seems to have implicitly admitted that Washington’s failures on this front have allowed into the country 1.3 million individuals who are arguably big threats to public safety (based on its estimate of an illegals population of 10 million).

The Post editorialists, in other words, were ignoring an indictment of current (and more lenient future) immigration policies that’s (understandably) been resonating with great shares of the American electorate: The federal government has paid too little attention to ensuring that these policies make the country’s existing population more secure, not less.

But this is where my mistake came in: I relied on the Post‘s description of the above data, rather than reading the report in which it first appeared. As a result, doing the subtraction, I tweeted that 13 percent of America’s illegal immigrants have serious criminal records. Mother Jones reporter Kevin Drum correctly pointed out that the study itself – put out by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) – did not peg the share of U.S. illegals with serious criminal records at 13 percent, and he was right. That figure covered the number of illegals the Institute judged would be considered “enforcement priorities” under the Obama administration’s latest guidelines.

According to MPI, this category also includes arguably less dangerous folks – namely, 60,000 illegals who have violated judicial removal orders issued since the start of 2014, and 640,000 members of this population who have entered the country illegally since then. Rounding out this enforcement priority group are the crooks – 690,000 resident illegal aliens who “have previously been convicted of a felony of serious misdemeanor.”

So I definitely should have been more thorough, and if I was, I would have seen that the illegal alien criminal population was 690,000, not the 1.3 million cited by the Post, and that the criminal proportion of the total illegals population was 6.3 percent, not 13 percent. (Actually, MPI’s math adds up to 1.39 million illegals in the enforcement priority group.). But even if MPI is correct (and it should be noted that it’s been a strong advocate of more lenient immigration policies), that means that America’s border control and deportation policies have enabled 750,000 individuals with serious criminal records or who have defied court orders to stay in the country.

Therefore, the questions posed to the Institute and to Drum by that apparent reality are the same that Post editors and other supporters of illegals-friendly immigration policies need to answer: Is that kind of increased threat to public safety remotely acceptable? And are restrictionist immigration policy critics wrong to shine the spotlight on it?

Judging by MPI’s support, in the same study, for the evasive (at best) claim that illegals’ rates of criminality are “low,” it seems clear that the Institute, anyway, has decided to fuel obfuscation. As long as this practice continues to be widespread among champions of more indulgent immigration policies, they can expect ever push-back from a public justifiably outraged about illegal immigrant crimes.