May 14, 2006

the first nativist responds

And, as predicted, uncritically, with saber-rattling to boot. "The findings are awfully telling." Except not in the way you might think.

Added: The second chimes in. "If they are sent back, who will commit the crimes?" he asks. Well, duh. These idiots will. (Don't worry, there are plenty more like them.)

And another, mentioning damning numbers. "YES to well-vetted, screened, qualified, desireable [sic] immigrants. NO to illegals." How about "NO to uncritical commentary" instead.

Another including a derogatory epithet.

Another with a double whammy: the bogus "95% of warrants" at no extra charge.

This time, uncritical passing-along by "The Lawman."

Why nuance when it's not deserved? I declare it thoughtless, no hesitation.

By and large the MSM hasn't picked up on the story, so far, perhaps because of liberal biases, or perhaps because the statistics are a non-starter. But not to this commentator.
What was staggering was that for the studied population of 55,322 incarcerated illegal immigrants, these numbers represented “about 8 arrests per illegal alien” and “about 13 offenses per illegal alien.”
Which really isn't all that staggering, especially when nearly all felons are under wraps for multiple offenses. Whatevah.

Innumeracy from The Other Side:
Hmmmm… and that’s only arrests: we all know the statistic that most criminals commit anywhere from four to eight crimes for each time they’re arrested. Taking six as the median, that means that the group of 55,332 illegal aliens committed about 4.2 million crimes. Somebody calculate what that costs the country—my little calculator hits the “.+E” wall with all those zeroes.
Even if six really is the median number of crimes per arrest, that would mean approximately 2.75 million crimes, a drop in the bucket'o'criminality.

And then there's Denise, who can't tell the difference between an arrested illegal immigrant and your everyday variety.
What does this tell you? It tells me they are definitely putting a strain on the economy, and that they’re not coming across the border merely to do the jobs that legal residents won’t do. Unless those legal residents were waiting to commit these crimes and got cheated out of the opportunity. And please note, there is no mention of what nationality these criminals hail from. That’s because it doesn’t matter. Don’t be fooled, people. This is not a race discrimination case. It’s a matter of national security.
And a matter of inexcusable ignorance.

Last, for now, let's not forget the aptly-named American Blowhole, which is so bad it might be parody.

Okay, not last, because there's Jim Kouri again, asking how you say "chutzpah" in Spanish. (It's cojones.)

And then there's McQ, who has the cojones to link to a NewsMax article claiming that 17% of the (federal--and this is unmentioned by McQ, but important) prison population are illegal immigrants--but doesn't have the cerebro to check the numbers for himself. A DOJ report from 2004 notes that "An estimated 8% of jail inmates were not U.S. citizens, unchanged from 1996."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I like the way that guy has the slogan "for free speech to live, political correctness must die" under the title of his blog. Did nobody tell him that being "politically correct" is a matter of voluntary capitulation to the rhetorical demands of one's ideological opponents? A more accurate slogan might be, "Free speech means abandoning rhetorical capitulation and saying what you think ought to be said."

Unknown said...

"The GAO results are pretty telling." Nice call. Back when I took my very, very, very, basic statistics class, my teacher spent two weeks showing how one could set up numbers to lie all the time.

He instilled a very deep mistrust of numbers in me. I also got an even deeper paranoia of those who takes those numbers at face value.