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.

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Im-Politic: Where Bill O’Reilly is Wrong and Right

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Bill O'Reilly, Brian Williams, Buenos Aires, Dabid Corn, El Salvador, Falklands War, Fox News, Hurricane Katrina, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, media bias, Mother Jones, NBC News, New Orleans

The more I think about it, the clearer it is to me that the best way in this hopelessly political era to discuss the Bill O’Reilly war record controversy is to start by pointing out what shouldn’t matter.

But first, a confession – which foreshadows my conclusion. I’ve been a “Factor” fan and something of an admirer of the “King of Cable Talk” for several years. Not that he hasn’t displayed major flaws. Even if I were Christian, I think I’d find the Fox News host’s “War on Christmas” claims way over the top. O’Reilly seems to have little awareness about the special problems – and prejudices – still facing many African Americans. He seems to believe that, because he finds abortion abhorrent, mainstream contemporary feminism lacks any merit. His grasp of economics, whether it’s fiscal and monetary policy, or trade – well, there simply is none. His foreign policy views are unnecessarily moralistic – even given the unmistakably Islamic and evil terrorist threat confronting America.

At the same time, O’Reilly’s conservatism contains praiseworthy populist elements. He gets in his bones the Wall Street’s responsibility for the financial crisis. He supports raising the minimum wage. He spotlighted the pressures squeezing America’s middle class well before it became fashionable on the Right.

O’Reilly’s non-partisan impulses shouldn’t be forgotten, either. He has unsparingly criticized both Democratic and Republican party figures, and praised the former from time to time. He has strongly condemned the loony – and often prejudice-rooted – personal criticisms hurled at President Obama by many extreme conservatives. He has openly admitted being wrong about supporting George W. Bush’s Iraq War (actually, I think he’s gone overboard here) – even though he favors using (limited, he says) ground forces versus ISIS and expresses full and unjustified confidence that they can leave quickly once their mission is accomplished. And he regularly features both regulars and guests with whom he disagrees.

But none of the above really matters in connection with whether O’Reilly has falsely described his experiences as a foreign correspondent. Nor does it matter that the Mother Jones article that first questioned O’Reilly’s veracity really does look like a political hit piece aimed at retaliating against conservatives and conservative journalists following the tall tales-prompted suspension of NBC News anchor Brian Williams. I don’t even care that Mother Jones author David Corn was not renewed as a Fox News contributor a few years ago, or that some of O’Reilly’s former colleagues at CBS News may be contradicting his account of events in Argentina because they’ve been nursing personal grudges. And there’s no reason to take seriously the argument that O’Reilly shouldn’t be held to Williams-like standards because he’s not hosting a straight news program.

All that matters is whether his claims to have experienced “war zone” conditions are credible based on what we can know about the circumstances and what we can’t know. And I genuinely regret to conclude that O’Reilly has engaged in exaggeration that’s unacceptable for someone with a prominent role in America’s national public policy debate – whether they proudly claim to run a “No-Spin Zone” or not.

The best and fairest analysis I’ve seen of the events O’Reilly covered in Buenos Aires following the British-Argentine Falklands War in 1982 comes from Washington Post media blogger Erik Wemple. His research into not only American sources but Argentine sources (including contemporary local newspapers) convinces me that the Fox host was reporting on a chaotic, violent, and dangerous situation. But it was not one that qualified as the “war zone” he calls it.

This isn’t a huge exaggeration. But neither is it the hair-splitting of which O’Reilly has accused his attackers. A few rounds of live ammo were fired by the police, as well as many more rubber bullets and tear gas. Injuries were suffered, and the fatalities cited by O’Reilly can’t be ruled out, although there is no positive evidence. But no heavier weapons – the kind typical of military operations – were used. The tumult O’Reilly covered lasted a single night. He was not embedded in any units of soldiers, and he didn’t accompany combat forces on his own. In short, he experienced nothing like reporters in real combat zones have experienced in genuine armed conflict for decades. (See these links for some brief descriptions of the World War II coverage of figures like Ernie Pyle, Walter Cronkite, and numerous others who spent prolonged periods on the front or in their air and naval equivalents.)

And this difference counts because O’Reilly has used his claims in efforts to distinguish himself from interlocutors who he depicts as unqualified to hold contrary opinions on military-related topics because they haven’t tasted such danger.

All of which means that O’Reilly’s exaggerations as such sound a lot like Brian Williams’ Iraq war stories. Moreover, just as Williams has been criticized for false reporting in other sets of circumstances (Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and the fall of the Berlin Wall), so has O’Reilly (for his accounts of his reporting of El Salvador’s insurgency in the 1980s). For some reason, though, the critics haven’t concentrated on those characterizations – and O’Reilly hasn’t addressed them.

The only major differences I can detect entail Williams’ contrition versus O’Reilly’s vituperation, and on NBC’s decision to suspend its star and examine his record versus Fox News’ decision to ignore O’Reilly’s. Bottom line: The Williams and O’Reilly misdeeds haven’t been modern journalism’s worst by a long shot. As a result, I’m open to the argument that both deserve a second chance (at least based on what is known so far). But I agree with those who would reserve forgiveness for those who seek it. So O’Reilly has a ways to go before he qualifies.

One final point: Speaking of journalistic misdeeds, something that’s truly garbage, as O’Reilly might put it, is the implication by Mother Jones authors Corn and Daniel Schulman that the “culture of deception within the liberal media” (their words) slammed repeatedly O’Reilly is a myth. If you doubt this, check out this compilation of confessions from mainstream media journalists. Which means that the worst outcome of O’Reilly’s troubles – including his often abusive counterattacks – could well be undercutting criticisms and concerns about a much more important problem.