Illegal Immigration Part 3 -- Crime

For those of you who have been following this blog, this series of posts was prompted by my many positive interactions with Mexican laborers who, to the best of my knowledge, have been illegal immigrants. In Part 1, I spoke of how in my experience, Mexican immigrants (whether illegal or legal) have always proved generous, hardworking, peaceable, and unassuming.

Shortly after that post, President Vincente Fox got into trouble for verbalizing much the same sentiment in terms which were both racist and obnoxious. He sounded more like a car salesman dissing his competitors than a statesman stating the case for his people. This prompted a second post by myself, in which I looked at what America gains by cooperating with Fox in his desire to open the borders to anybody from his country who wants to head north.

Today I am writing about the issue of illegal immigrants and crime.

The very day before my original post on illegals, a Denver detective murdered by a Mexican Illegal was buried amid much well deserved outrage and mourning. The killer, a 19-year-old Mexican, has been traced back to Los Angeles where he ditched his stolen car. The fugitive is probably safe in Mexico right now where President Vincente Fox does not extradite suspects who are likely to be tried for a capital crime.

Egg on my face, of course.

But any egg on my face is nothing compared to the loss experienced by the family of slain Detective Donald Young. American law enforcement officers put their lives on the line day after day to preserve our own lives and liberty, including the liberty of bloggers like me who short sightedly bleat about how "I've never met an illegal I didn't like." I do here apologize to the family of Detective Young, and hope that if they ever read this post they can forgive me for considering the serious matter of the link between violent crime and illegal immigration in the dismissive, personal terms which I used while writing last Saturday.

I do not know the stats on the proportion of illegal immigrants who are violent criminals. If anyone has hard, statistical information on illegal immigrants and crime, I sure would appreciate a comment or a note. Michelle Malkin, whom I highly esteem and who provides plenty of anecdotal information regarding illegal immigration and policy about the same, provides little in the way of hard stats and analysis. (BTW: here is a link to her take on the Denver tragedy.)

You can also look at this website dedicated to chronicling the crimes, both violent and otherwise, in this country committed by illegals. Again, it's pretty bad. At the same time, there are no stats about percentages of illegals involved in violent crime, whether they are more or less likely than the general American population to be involved in this crime, what the country of origin of these illegals are by percentage, and so forth. I notice that most of the criminals discussed on the site are not Mexican. Although many of the criminals flee to Mexico to escape justice, most of the criminals seem either to be from the Caribbean or from Central America.

Fox's policy of providing de-facto sanctuary for suspects in capital crimes is pure folly. If he wants the United States to continue cooperating, he needs to arrest and extradite those Mexicans accused of committing murder in the United States. If President Bush doesn't get tough with Fox on this issue, Republican candidates across the southwest and in urban areas will pay the price.

Conclusion: crime among illegals is a serious matter. If, earlier, I portrayed illegals as a legion of saints, I was wrong. Also wrong is to permit a situation in which criminals can come into this country, murder people, go home again, and not worry about having justice executed on them. At the same time, the use of anecdotal rather than statistical evidence regarding crime among illegals may constitute a liable of sorts against the vast majority of illegals whose only crime is in their actual presence in this country.