Illegal Aliens Kill More Americans Than Iraq War

Originally posted February 16, 2007

Illegal Aliens Kill More Americans Than Iraq War

By The Editors

As noted in Illegal Alien Crime Wave in Full Swing, in April 2005, the GAO released a report on a study of 55,322 illegal aliens incarcerated in federal, state, and local facilities during 2003. It found the following:

Of the 55,322 illegal aliens studied, researchers found that they were arrested a total of 459,614 times, averaging about 8 arrests per illegal alien.

· They were arrested for a total of about 700,000 criminal offenses, averaging about 13 offenses per illegal alien.

· 49% had previously been convicted of a felony, 20% of a drug offense; 18% a violent offense, and 11%, other felony offenses.

· 81% of the arrests occurred after 1990

· 56% of those charged with a reentry offense had previously been convicted on at least 5 prior occasions.

· Defendants charged with unlawful reentry had the most extensive criminal histories. 90% had been previously arrested. Of those with a prior arrest, 50% had been arrested for violent or drug-related felonies.

All of these crimes would have never happened, i.e. they were preventable, has we had a serious program of deportation of the illegal aliens already here and proper border security to prevent both entry and re-entry.

In reviewing those numbers, note that the study sampled only about 21% of the incarcerated illegal aliens. To get the full extent of the collateral damage, we need to apply the average number of offenses across all 267,000 currently incarcerated illegal alien criminals. Doing so results in 1,288,619 crimes!

Don’t let the mainstream media and illegal alien advocates tell you that illegal immigration is a “victimless crime” and that they are here only to do the work Americans don’t want to do. Since each crime has a victim, 1,288,619 sounds like a lot of victimization to us. Also keep in mind that the 1,288,619 crimes are only the ones committed by the hard core illegal alien criminals who were finally caught and incarcerated. The ones not caught and the new criminals crossing daily are committing more crime each and every day.

One of the problems in identifying the involvement of illegal aliens in crime is that NO ONE TRACKS IT as a particular demographic statistic. While the INS keeps track of all sorts of demographic data for the illegal aliens who were actually arrested and deported and puts it in the Yearbook of Immigration Statistics, the judicial system does not track it. As noted in Cop Murder Spotlights Crisis of Killer Aliens - No Government Agency Tracks Crimes by Illegals, Not Even Attacks on Police, nobody really knows how many illegal alien criminals there are or how many crimes they are actually committing. Many simply fall through the cracks.

If we assume illegal aliens commit crimes at the same rate as citizens in the general population, an assumption that may grossly underestimate their involvement, we can estimate the number of crimes being committed by illegal aliens. To do this, we note the number of illegal aliens in the population and apply the percentage representation in the population to the total number of crimes committed.

The current population of illegal aliens ranges from a generally accepted low of 12 million to a few estimates in the 25-30 million range. For the purposes of this discussion, we will use a relatively lower estimate of 15 million in a population of 300 million which is a 5% representation. It is worth noting that many official government figures are a bit lower number. If in fact accurate, a lower number of illegal aliens in the general population would actually increase their disproportionate involvement, something that is probably occurring anyway, as we shall see latter.

According to FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Crime in the United States (CIUS) 2005, we now take the Estimated Number of Arrests and apply a straight 5% illegal alien participation. These numbers are grossly understated as you will see later in this article, but we include them as an academic exercise to show what the bottom-most numbers could be:

This calculates:

CRIMES (actual arrests)	Number In USA	by illegal aliens
Total	14,094,186	704,709
Murder & non-negligent manslaughter	14,062	703
Forcible rape	25,528	1,276
Offenses against family & children	129,128	6,456

The last column is the estimated criminal collateral damage inflicted by illegal aliens for 2005 as a straight proportional percentage basis of the population. Similar collateral damage would have been inflicted in 2006 and you can expect about as much in 2007.

Using a simple cost-benefit analysis, is this much crime acceptable to save ten cents on a head of lettuce?

You probably wouldn’t think so if you were one of the 704,709 victims, and as one of the murder victims, you wouldn’t be able to think at all. Again, keep in mind, this is the collateral damage being PER YEAR with a 5% participation rate. If the number of illegal aliens is greater than 15 million the number of crimes goes up. If the participation rate is greater, the number of crimes goes up.

In determining who is actually committing the crimes and whether the 5% straight participation is valid, as noted in The Tarpit blog, Hispanics/Latinos, by far the largest component of illegal aliens, become “White, Caucasian, or Other” perpetrators in Arizona. The same thing in Colorado, Florida, New Jersey, New Mexico, and probably other states as well. Even the FBI doesn’t seem to want to know, as neither the nationality of the perpetrator nor a Hispanic/Latino category is even present in either their Uniform Crime Reports or Victims and Offenders Supplement.

When we inquired of Justice Department why they didn’t want to know if Hispanics or foreign nationals were committing any crime, their response was:

“The Uniform Crime Reporting Program was mandated by Congress to collect and publish the crimes that are reported to police agencies for statistical purposes, not investigative purposes.

The elements of race and ethnicity built into the UCR Program adhere to the guidelines established by DIRECTIVE NO 15, RACE AND ETHNIC STANDARDS FOR FEDERAL STATISTICS AND ADMINISTRATIVE REPORTING. Those guidelines are set by the Office of Management and Budget, and as a federal agency in the capacity of overseer of the UCR Program, the FBI is required to abide by those guidelines. For UCR purposes there are four racial categories: White; Black; American Indian or Alaskan Native; and Asian or Pacific Islander. The term Hispanic is an indicator of ethnicity, and the UCR Program does not currently collect information on ethnicity.”

We also asked the Justice Department what categories the foreign national terrorists and the 2,752 Americans killed by foreign nationals on 9-11-2001 fell into but did not get a response.

While the Justice Department tracks nearly every conceivable aspect of crime, evidently, Congress wants to know only what crimes “White, Black, American Indian, and Asian” Americans are committing. It is interesting that ethnicity is totally unimportant for determining who is committing crimes, but is very important for establishing minority status and preferences. It does not strain credulity to imagine that crimes are being committed by illegal aliens, aka foreign nationals, but unfortunately for Americans, these statistics are not tracked.

While we are on the subject of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), Jim Kouri notes in Crime Statistics and the Itsy Bitsy Yellow Polka Dot Bikini:

“Yet the public is generally unaware that the UCR system is essentially a voluntary system; there is no federal legislation that requires States or local jurisdictions to report their crime data to the FBI.

The voluntary nature of the UCR, of course, affects the accuracy and completeness of the data. Although the FBI devotes a great deal of attention to the quality of the data it publishes in CIUS, it cannot mandate agencies to provide data on time (or at all).”

Thus, if anything, the FBI underreports crime.

In any case, it would appear that other than what the INS reports when foreign nationals are deported, NO ONE IS TRACKING CRIMES COMMITTED ON US SOIL BY FOREIGN NATIONALS. Given the serious of the crimes and the large participation by mostly Hispanic and illegal alien, a.k.a. foreign national, criminals it seems almost as if the various government agencies don’t want us to know. Also, we could not find any investigative reporting by the mainstream media on the issue. If even a small number of those 704,709 crimes were committed against members of the media or politicians maybe we would have heard something…but the silence is deafening.

As noted in the previously-mentioned September 2006 article, Cop Murder Spotlights Crisis of Killer Aliens, in WND:

“While no government agencies specifically track crimes by illegal aliens, there have been some efforts to quantify the loss. Last December, Mac Johnson set out to investigate the number of homicides perpetrated by illegal aliens. Since the federal government would not provide any useful information, he contacted all 50 statehouses. Three months later, he had fewer than a dozen responses. Only one state, Vermont, provided any useful information.

He then set out to estimate statistically the number of murders by illegal aliens based on available crime data and conservative estimates of the actual number of illegal aliens in the country – which, of course, no one really knows.

He found that between 1,806 and 2,510 people in the U.S. are murdered annually by illegal aliens. If he's right, that would represent between 11 percent and 15 percent of all murders in the U.S.”

Using the mean of Mr. Johnson’s range, there are 2,158 murders committed annually by illegal aliens – crimes that never would have happened if they weren’t here. This is part of the collateral damage of tolerating illegal immigration.

Note that at 2,158 murders, that is 15.3% of all the murders reported by the FBI, which would be about three times the representation of illegal aliens in the general population. Whether illegal aliens are committing three times as many of the other crimes as well is unknown because NO ONE IS TRACKING IT. Regardless, keep that “three times” in mind because it will come up again.

At this point it is worth noting Representative King states, in Biting the Hand That Feeds You, that illegal aliens are responsible for 4,380 murders. I believe Congressman King based his numbers on two GAO reports (d05337r and d05646r). He apparently then took the number of incarcerated illegal aliens and the total number of incarcerated prisoners and applied the resulting percentage to the FBI’s reported number of crimes. Based on this estimate, illegal aliens would be responsible for about 31% of the murders, a rate that is about 6.2 times their representation in the population. While there are indications that this number may be more accurate, no one really knows because NO ONE IS TRACKING IT.

Returning to the FBI’s crime list and a straight 5% prorated share committed by illegal aliens, some 704,709 crimes in 2005 were committed and each of these crimes has both a personal and economic impact. You can easily imagine the personal devastation on individuals and on families since all these crimes would not have happened if there were no illegal aliens in the country. Moreover, the unfortunate fact is that we as a nation and people have tolerated, and in many cases aided and abetted, illegal immigration.

The economic burden these crimes impose on their victims and on society have significant costs attached to them. As noted earlier, there has been a tremendous increase in the law enforcement budgets and each criminal arrested needs to be incarcerated at about $25,000 per year. How much more law enforcement is spending as a direct consequence of illegal aliens is unknown but reviewing the expenditure graphs, note that the rate of the expenditures increases after around 1989 which corresponds with the large increase in the illegal alien population.

In any case, with 267,000 illegal aliens incarcerated as of 2003, just the incarceration costs at $25,000 per inmate per year is $6.7 BILLION per year. We’ll take a wild guess that you didn’t realize we were spending that much. Do you have any better ideas on what we could be spending $6.7 billion a year on rather than providing three meals a day and color TV to a bunch of illegal alien prisoners? While you think about that, here is another one to ponder: how much money would we have saved since 1980 if there were still only 9,000 incarcerated illegal aliens rather than 267,000?

As extensive as these direct costs are, there are also indirect costs imposed on the victims, including loss of income and property, uncompensated hospital bills, and treatment for resulting emotional and psychological trauma, to say nothing of permanent physical disabilities.

As noted in the abstract of the report Victim Costs of Violent Crime and Resulting Injuries, by Miller, Cohen, and Rossman:

“This DataWatch estimates the costs and monetary value of lost quality of life due to death and nonfatal physical and psychological injury resulting from violent crime. In 1987 physical injury to people age twelve and older resulting from rape, robbery, assault, murder, and arson caused about $10 billion in potential health-related costs, including some unmet mental health care needs. It led to $23 billion in lost productivity and almost $145 billion in reduced quality of life (in 1989 dollars). If associated deaths and cases resulting in psychological injury only are included, costs average $47,000 for rape, $19,000 for robbery, $15,000 for assault, and $25,000 for arson. Considering only survivors with physical injury, rape cost $60,000, robberies $25,000, assaults $22,000, and arson $50,000. Costs are almost $2.4 million per murder. Lifetime costs for all intentional injuries totaled $178 billion during 1987-1990.”

Note that those costs are in 1989 dollars. Using the CPI index to adjust for 2006 dollars, multiply those numbers by 1.62 which means that, today, each rape costs society an average of $76,140 and each murder costs some $3.9 million. Thus just the 2,158 murders committed by illegal aliens burdened our society with $8.4 BILLION in costs.

The report tabulates the various costs for each crime as follows:

And all this…to save ten cents on a head of lettuce?

C’mon America…this is YOUR problem and only YOU can clean it up. Your elected officials will not do this unless you tell them to. Go here to register your complaint. Your thoughts matter.

OR:

Go to http://www.securedbordersusa.com/ and sign the petition which must be notarized. And then to send it to all your family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are fed up with illegal immigration and ask them to sign it, too.

Brought to you by the research staff and editors of FamilySecurityMatters.org

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