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Originally Posted by _______
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.
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I understand what you are saying, but I'm still not sure I'm buying it totally.
There are 320 million people in the US. When the number of illegal immigrants comes up, I've seen estimates that range from 10 million to 30 million depending on the
motivation of the author. Officially it's a little over 11m. That's why I suggested it's probably really somewhere between 3% and 7%. I doubt it's 9%, but if it is, that's a different problem.
I'm also going to guess that even if the illegals are all sent to Federal prison, they are typically not just being sent away because they don't have papers. I've known illegals. None ever got sent away to prison. No one knows they are illegal. What happens is that they get caught committing a crime and that exposes that they are illegal. Plus, there may be illegals in state prison for things other than the fact that they are illegal.
