Arizona Rep. Russell K. Pearce Responds
I have really tried to keep politics off of this blog. The one time I did post anything political it had a definite connection to economics and the free market. If you didn't see it, I posted something about the Arizona Representative Russell Pearce. I was merely pointing out the fact that he was introducing laws that put artificial constraints on his state's economy and then claiming that, since his state was a "free market", it would adjust. I didn't think he would appreciate the irony I was pointing out.
Well today I received an email from Rep. Pearce. It was long and very strange. Here is how it begins. (Oh, did I mention that the underlying issue is immigration?)
You should understand our "Sovereign" rights as a nation. The Rule of Law. The damage to America and Americans.
26 AMERICANS DIE DAILY AT THE HANDS OF THESE "ILLEGALS" EVERY YEAR. 25 EVERYDAY, 12 BY STABBINGS AND SHOOTINGS AND 13 BY DUI AND OTHER RELATED CRIMES. APPARENTLY YOU AND OTHERS COULD CARE LESS ABOUT....AND OUR GOVERNMENT WILL SHED NOT ONE TEAR OVER THIS..THIS IS FROM A CONGRESSIONAL REPORT. (AZ Officers murdered, Officer Atkins, Officer Erfle, Officer Martin, Officer Eggle, and the list goes on!!!!$2 billion annually in Arizona to educate illegal alien children in K - 12.
The email goes on and on and on. I was absolutely shocked by the ranting and raving of the email. This is a paid Representative of the Arizona State government. Just amazing.
I was obviously sceptical about Pearce's claims (even if they didn't agree from one sentence to the next) and decided to do a little web research and some grade school level arithmetic. The plot below is data from the FBI and gives the murder rate (per 100,000 people) for several states. I chose these because they have experienced the largest increases in migrant workers and illegal immigrants.
I have to say that I was surprised by the falling murder rates across the board. It also seems to say that if illegals are responsible for so many murders, their population must be falling too.
I'm sure the anti-immigration camp doesn't believe that, so I looked up their numbers. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the illegal population stood at 8 million in 2000 and was 3.5 million in 1990. This is a increase of 500,000 a year. So using the FBI murder rates and a US population of 300 million, I put together a daily murder rate.
You can reproduce the graph on your own. Just divide the total population by 100,000 and then multiply that number by the given murder rate. Finally, take that number an divide by 365 to get the murders per day, which is shown on the chart.
What is obvious is that, although the illegal immigrant population has grown by a rate of almost 1400 per day (according to the census bureau) the murder rate has gone from 61 per day in 1996 to 47 per day in 2006. The data seems pretty obvious, the murders per day have declined while the number of illegals entering the country has increased. Clearly, murders committed by illegal immigrants is a non-issue.
I think the FBI's data is a little more reliable than Rep Pearce's. Using his number, 30% of all murders in the USA are by illegal immigrants. That is insane and so is Rep Pearce.
10 comments:
But you have to admit that he's ghetto-fabulous!
Ghetto-fabulous indeed.
Wow! Those charts you drew up really drive the point home. I can't believe the email Rep. Pearce sent--how unprofessional and immature. If he wants people to listen to him, perhaps he should turn off his CAPS LOCK! Where do people come up with their crazy statistics??
The entire email is so long I can't post the whole thing. Here is another strange tidbit.
"I want you to know how I reverence the Constitution; this sacred document given to us by God through the Founders that sought inspiration as they forged this inspired document."
Thanks, I always wanted know how much someone can reverence something, but I don't remember anything in the constitution about illegal immigration.
Hi -
My name is Craig McDermott, and I'm a political blogger from AZ, and Rep. Pearce is one of my favorite topics, in a "he's an embarrassment to the entire state" sort of way.
Could you forward his email to me at cpmaz[at]yahoo.com? It would be greatly appreciated.
He is always a front-runner for my annual "Legislative Loon Award," and this email may just cement the title for him this year.
Thank you.
Russell Pearce is ghetto-fabulous but he needs to look at reality.
Ramiro Martinez Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, has sifted through homicide records in border cities like San Diego and El Paso, both heavily populated by Mexican immigrants, both places where violent crime has fallen significantly in recent years. He discovered that the homicide rate for Hispanics was lower than for other groups, even though their poverty rate was very high, if not the highest, in these metropolitan areas. He found the same thing in the Haitian neighborhoods of Miami.
In his book “New York Murder Mystery,” the criminologist Andrew Karmen examined the trend in New York City -- where the 2007 murder rate was the lowest since 1963, when I was 12 years old -- and likewise found that the “disproportionately youthful, male and poor immigrants” who arrived during the 1980s and 1990s “were surprisingly law-abiding” and that their settlement into once-decaying neighborhoods helped “put a brake on spiraling crime rates.”
The most prominent advocate of the “more immigrants, less crime” theory is Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard. Sampson was an author of a 2005 article in The American Journal of Public Health that reported the findings of a detailed study of crime in Chicago. Based on information gathered on the perpetrators of more than 3,000 violent acts committed between 1995 and 2002, supplemented by police records and community surveys, it found that the rate of violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.
First-generation immigrants are about 45 percent less likely to commit crimes than third-generation immigrants. In turn, second-generation immigrants are about a quarter less likely to commit crime than third-generation.
So, in other words, native Americans, those born here and whose parents are born here, are the most violent and the most criminal.
Immigrants are less likely to be imprisoned relative to their numbers; Latinos, in particular, even though they enter the country being disproportionately poor, which would signal, based on everything else we know, that they would have a high risk for all sorts of negative outcomes, including poor health, low-birth-weight babies, incarceration, violence and so forth, are less likely to be imprisoned. They are doing rather well in many dimensions, and this has led to what is known in the literature as "the Latino paradox." And the paradox is just that -- even though they are disproportionately poor and have all kinds of risk factors, they are doing better in many dimensions.
From what I've read, Pearce's son was shot by an undocumented alien, and this has influenced his views a great deal.
Also, as you said, he is insane.
I'm freelance journalist and student at ASU. I'm working on some immigration bills that have been introduced by Sen. Pearce. He is quite a character.
I would really appreciate if you could forward this email to me:
eis4evan[at]yahoo.com
Thanks.
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