Quote:
Originally Posted by classhandicapper
I have no idea what the reality is on this, but I want to point out that something seems amiss in this discussion.
One post claims that 23% of the prison population is made up of illegal immigrants and another says that the accurate number is 38%.
You are claiming that when you back out violations of immigration law illegals are no more likely to commit crimes than other Americans.
I don't know what percentage of the total US population is made up of illegal immigrants, but it's probably between 3%-7%. So if they were committing crimes at the same rate, the prison population should be a similar percent. I'll grant a couple of ticks higher just in case there is some kind of racism at work and some are in jail for immigration violation. But the numbers still don't add up. Something is wrong.
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What's off is the deliberate exclusion of state prison's where most inmates are incarcerated and where immigration isn't a crime (The Constitution leaves the power enforce immigration law to the Federal government).
Undocumented immigrants are closer to 9% of the total population and around 4% of the combined state/federal prison population. But those numbers don't paint the picture the author's of pieces like those linked want you to take away. So they ignore the much larger state prison population and focus on only the tiny sliver in Federal prisons where (Shocker!!) people caught without papers are incarcerated.
They leave it to the reader to draw the conclusion that there is a crime wave being committed by illegals when, for the most part, the crime is nothing more than overstaying a visa or entering illegally.
The big picture is that undocumented aliens are a smaller slice of the much larger state prison population than their population outside. State prison is where you would find evidence of an undocumented crime wave and it simply isn't there. Undocumented are statistically LESS likely to be convicted of a crime and sentenced to prison than the population as a whole.
But, people will quote the linked articles because it reinforces their already held beliefs and ignore anything that like this that points out the flaws in their conclusions.
