NBC Covers Up Evidence of Immigration Crime Wave

Apparently neither Mr. Todd nor his research staff ever thought to look up the government’s own 2011 report on criminal alien activity, published by the Government Accountability Office.

Breitbart News emailed Mr. Todd and his show to ask why the government’s own data, and a great deal more information, which would have disproven Mr. Todd’s sweeping declaration, was omitted.  A staff aid to Mr. Todd replied: “no comment.”

The 2011 U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report documents crimes committed by foreign alien nationals inside the United States.  It counts as an alien any immigrant who has not been “naturalized” – that is, any alien who has applied for and been conferred with citizenship after being brought into the United States from their home country.  Therefore, even this report would not include the criminal offenses of the millions of immigrants inside the U.S. who have converted their green cards into citizenship papers, about 19.3 million.  So, for instance, the elder Boston Bomber, the recent Chattanooga Shooter, and other immigrant terrorists naturalized by the federal government would be counted by the government as citizen crimes, not alien crimes.

The report tallies approximately 3 million arrest offenses attached to the incarcerated criminal alien population. Of these offenses, half a million were drug related, 70,000 were sexual offenses, 213,000 were for assault, 125,000 were for larceny/theft, and 25,000 were for homicides. Based on the GAO’s sample of criminal aliens, they estimated that their study population of 249,000 criminal aliens was arrested about 1.7 million times, averaging about 7 arrests per criminal alien.

By definition, not one one of these crimes would have occurred absent the immigrant who committed it – in other words, without admitting these individuals, there would have been at least 70,000 fewer sexual assaults, 25,000 fewer slayings, 125,000 fewer robberies, and so forth.

According to the GAO report, just looking at the federal prison population, of 51,000 criminal aliens incarcerated in federal prison in December 2010, 68 percent were citizens of Mexico, and almost 90 percent were from one of seven Latin American countries: Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Mr. Todd and his research staff apparently also did not see the recent U.S. Sentencing Commission data that showed that although illegal aliens only account for 3.5 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for 36.7 percent of federal sentences in Fiscal Year 2014.

Mr. Todd and his research staff were also apparently not aware that, in 2009, 57 percent of the 76 fugitive murderers most wanted by the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) were foreign-born (either illegal aliens or aliens given visas).

Perhaps even more shocking, but not mentioned by Mr. Todd or his staff, is that although six times more U.S. residents are U.S.-born than foreign-born, foreign-born are responsible for four-times more terrorism convictions.  Or, put another way, 13.5% of the population is responsible for 64% of terrorism convictions. The vast majority of the foreign-born present in the United States are granted entrance as part of our nation’s historic dispensation of millions of visas to foreign workers, their families, and lifetime immigrants seeking permanent settlement inside the United States.

However, even these statistics documenting the relationship between terror convictions and the foreign-born population undercounts the affect of immigration on terrorism because the children of immigrants charged with terrorism — who would not be in the United States but for immigration — would count as native crimes.  Additionally, these statistics do not account for the role of immigrants responsible for radicalizing “homegrown” jihadis; consider, for instance, that the Islamic Society of Boston — a mosque whose terror network has been well-documented and evidenced in attacks ranging from the Boston bombing to the last year’s Oklahoma beheading — was founded by immigrants. 

Moreover, Mr. Todd and his research staff were apparently also not familiar with the acclaimed work of Manhattan Institute Scholar Heather Mac Donald, who has published extensively on this topic. In an exclusive quote to Breitbart News, Mac Donald observes:

What’s telling is that there’s not a single amnesty proposal that has ever required a clean criminal record from the targets of amnesty. [Amnesty advocates] inevitably wink at two misdemeanor convictions– and to get a misdemeanor condition you have to work pretty hard in your criminal offending. That’s an acknowledgement on the part of advocates that they’re not dealing with a completely crime free population, otherwise it should be no sweat to require a clean criminal record.

The media also relies on some confused data sets when discussing alien versus native crime rates. For instance, studies cited by the media consider all crimes committed by the children of illegal aliens to be native crimes — not foreign crimes. The same goes with all aliens in general: their children’s crimes are counted as native crimes, not as result of immigration policy. The media also typically does not draw distinctions for country of origin, economic status, or any other useful information considering the immigrant population.  So, when discussing immigrant crime rates, the media would average together both the criminal record of a billionaire investor from Canada and an MS-13 gang member from El Salvador.  And when discussing native crime rate, the media would average together the U.S-born child of an MS-13 gang member with a 10th generation American whose ancestors fought in the War of 1812.

This is important because (as Mac Donald has explained in previous writings) data from the pro-immigration Migration Policy Institute has shown that “between the foreign-born generation and their American children, the incarceration rate of Mexican-Americans jumps more than eightfold, resulting in an incarceration rate that is 3.45 times higher than that of whites”– yet not one of these crimes would be attributed to the consequences of immigration policy by Mr. Todd or his research staff.

Census data shows that incarceration rates amongst U.S-born Hispanic men are 157 percent higher than the incarceration rates of white men.

In 2008, Heather Mac Donald wrote:

California, with one-quarter of the nation’s immigrants and its greatest concentration of Mexicans and Central Americans, is the bellwether state for all things relating to unbridled Hispanic immigration, including crime. The Children of Immigrants Longitudinal Study, conducted by sociologists Alejandro Portes of Princeton and Rubén G. Rumbaut of the University of California, Irvine, followed the children of immigrants in San Diego and Miami from 1992 to 2003. A whopping 28 percent of Mexican-American males between the ages of 18 and 24 reported having been arrested since 1995, and 20 percent reported having been incarcerated—a rate twice that of other immigrant groups. Anyone who speaks to Hispanic students in immigrant-saturated schools in Southern California will invariably hear the estimate that 50 percent of a student’s peers have ended up in gangs or other criminal activities.

Academically, there are several reasons why statisticians would need to look at second- and third-generation offending rates from certain immigrant groups to gain a sense for policymakers of the intersection between immigration from poor countries and crime rates. For one, most criminals have high rates of recidivism, but if an alien commits a crime, they are eligible for deportation — reducing the opportunities for recidivism in the first generation compared to the second and third. Also, most crimes are committed by males between the ages of 16 to 24, but most foreigners tend to immigrate outside that age range.

It is also easier for aliens to evade conviction as they can flee the jurisdiction or the country altogether.  These, and other factors, require looking at second- and third-generation immigrant families to determine how immigration from certain regions of the world impacts community crime.