But no one is proposing banning other languages, we’d still have them. Just that the government not have to provide materials in all the various languages.
Agreed. That is why I tried to craft some steps that would have many/most of them leaving of their own accord.
Some of your links didn’t work. But I found this point made by Robert Rector (your Link #1), which seems to be on point for this discussion about crime and illegal immigrants. (bolding mine)
Thanks for the contribution.
I haven’t read the link yet, but I’ve read other material on that subject. Does the study to which he refers control for other factors, such as poverty or level of education?
By highlighting those sentence fragments he thinks support his thesis, magellan01 surely feels he has done all the intellectual heavy lifting necessary on the matter. So as the person responsible for carelessly giving him access to a distortable piece of text, I suppose I’ll have to clean up the mess. I have to confess, though, to a morbid curiosity as to what magpie might have come up with as a conclusion from what he had read, had he not been so tired from all the bolding-ing.
Anyhow, to put the quote in perspective: Mr. Rector of the very conservative Heritage Foundation was on a panel discussing the CIS findings, whose $20 billion/year figure included costs of law enforcement and incarceration. But the gentleman’s top-of-the-head musings on crime are not part of the CIS study or any other of which I’m aware. And, if you read what he said, either in context or just the parts that made our illustrious OP tingle, it’s clear that his speculations are just daft. First, he admits he has no idea what the actual numbers are (before going on to pull some out of a hat), and then, egregiously, he assumes that each incarcerated person, from the poorest scofflaw to Jeffrey Skilling, bears an equal responsibility for the financial impact of crime in any given year. Folks, art majors don’t abuse statistics that badly. The fact is, there’s no way to assess this unless you know who is committing what crimes, and the only thing we know about that is the study indicating that Hispanic immigration, legal or not, tends to reduce violent crime. Sharply. Especially in the first generation.
But let’s say it’s true that illegal immigrants constitute about a fifth of federal prisoners. Given that federal prisoners constitute less than 8 percent of the whole, the stat isn’t really that overwhelming. Perhaps illegal offenders are more likely to be incarcerated federally: if there’s a tendency for them to be caught at border crossings (regardless of what they’re eventually charged with), they may end up in a federal facility at a higher rate than others convicted of the same crimes. As for the crimes, there’s no information here, really, at all. I’m suspicious of being so often told the crimes were other than illegal entry without being told what they were. After all, criminalizing a group of twelve million people is bound to lead to crimes other than the illicit border crossing itself, but which are part and parcel of a person’s undocumented status: identity fraud, document falsification, etc. And of course everybody gets busted for marijuana possession, if they’re in the right demographic.
Nor is it all that damning that a certain group might be arrested and incarcerated at a higher rate than other groups. A lot of groups can claim this honor, the white non-poor being a notable exception.
In any event, it’s just as stupid to fight crime by trying to identify and eliminate criminal classes of people as it is to fight disease by attacking segments of the population who are more susceptible to disease.
And, since I’m of the opinion that there isn’t much point in trying to influence the OP, because I think he’s here not to discuss but to catch flies, the only other issue I’ll address is how awfully, futilely silly is his cause. We’ve always been a nation of immigrants. English immigrants, other European immigrants, African and Asian immigrants, and now and for the foreseeable future, mostly Latino and other Hispanic immigrants. The only thing that will slow down illegal immigration is to speed up the legal kind; but either way they will continue to arrive and grow and bring their heritage with them, sharing their culture for us to choose from and embracing what they like in ours. They will speak and change our language. They will create, and change our art. They will write and change our literature. They will vote and change our laws, they will purchase and change what’s on the shelves in our stores, they will watch TV and listen to music and change pop culture, they will be educated and change education. And they will marry and integrate and change the complexions of our grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And it will still be America, land of immigrants, land of opportunity, better for each new generation that does not turn its back on the words of Emma Lazarus. And those of us who tried to stop it, who tried to turn people away or at least make them leave their language and culture behind, will not be celebrated by these Americans for their obstinacy. They will not be spoken of, except briefly and with a vague sense of shame, by their descendents.
I was just surprised at the statistic quoted, is all; back in the days when I was working for the Feds (Office of the Immigration Judge, aka Immigration Court), one of my duties was to travel to state and Federal prisons around the Midwest to interpret in deportation proceedings as part of what was then called the Criminal Alien Program, now known as the Institutional Hearing Program. The statistic I heard back then was that 25% of the prison population were aliens of any sort, not aliens who had entered in or remained in the U.S. illegally. That’s a very different kettle of fish. (This House Judiciary Committee testimony from 1997 is a bit dated – and I left the DOJ in 1994, anyway - supports my memory.) The stats on inmates may be different now, but I doubt they are THAT drastically different.
And I’d love to see some more detailed stats on the crimes for which aliens are incarcerated, if possible broken down by State vs. Federal offenses, and if possible, compared against stats for U.S. citizens, native-born or otherwise. No time to look right this minute, but who’s game?
Funny, that’s the same argument burglars and dope dealers use.
You gotta survive. You gotta feed your family. Agreed. You DON’T gotta break the law to do it.
Did you know that in many states, people who are legally present in the U.S. cannot obtain a driver’s license, because they are not eligible for Social Security numbers, becasue they are not authorized to work? I had a (British) wife of a multinational executive client pulled over for driving on her U.K. license after 2 years - she had no way of obtaining one, thoguh legally in the U.S. as a dependent of her husband, who was on a work visa.
Since history shows a decidely biased immigration policy against nonwhites, you’ll excuse me for coming to the conclusion that the persecution of certain ethnic immigrant groups is racially based. I mean there were massive deportations not only of Mexican immigrants but also Mexican-American citizens citizens in the 1930s. If they looked Mexican to the authorities they were sent south. Then you had the illustriously named Operation Wetback during the 1950s. This wasn’t a nickname mind you but the official name of the operation.
I wonder how an Operation Mick or Operation Squarehead would have been viewed? Would white American have stood for mass deportation of northern Europeans?
I’d also like to point out that not all of the 12 million “illegals” - gah, I hate that word, in the US are Latin American.
The GAO found that as of 2000, 2.3 million people in the US illegally were actually visa overstays, and that that number “omits an unknown number of long-term overstays from Mexico and Canada. It also does not cover short-term overstays who have not established residence here.”
From The Orange County Register:
So, not all 12 million people who are here illegally are sneaking across the border. Millions are not necessarily working as gardeners and janitors, and millions are not “brown”. Just so’s you know.
This is laughable. I show some statistics from *your *cite that support my OP (there were many more that supported my larger position against illegal immigration) and you attempt tp pooh-pooh them. Then you claim they that the “only thing we know” about the issue is what one study revealed. You do know that we’ve been discussing ILLEGAL immigrants, don’t you? So, please show where that article states that the findings apply specifically to the conduct of ILLEGAL immigrants.
And do you have no reservations about this study? Or, because you think it supports you, you just accept it? Assumming it even says what you think it says.
Some of us are also talking about LEGAL immigrants. Are you going to address the findings I cited on the Institutional Hearing Program, above, or are you going to ignore them because they poke holes in items you have cited?
First, I meant to thank you for the information, then got involved in responding to specific posters.
Regarding the findings from the Institutional Hearing Program, I’m not sure it pokes holds into what I’ve been saying. It was a while ago and found 25% to be aliens ( of any sort. I think TKOS’s cirte was from 2004. And they might not be that far off. From your experience, what would you estimate—in the study you cited—to be the percent of illegals in the statistic of aliens in prison? PLease calrify if I’m missing something.
In looking for more up to date numbers I found this from CIS
this from the LA Times Opinion Borderline (it served as a good compilation)
From the CIS link:
Why thank you for declaring a failure all the people like me that then became Americans.
Speaking of the CIS:
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=106
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=589
There was also a genocide practiced by the Texas Rangers and armed groups of White armed citizens during the early part of the 20th Century against Hispanics in South Texas along with an organized White Business and White Government effort to strip South Texas Hispanics who were non-immigrant US Citizens of their property. There was active public and private discrimination throughout the last century against Texas Hispanics.
I gotta ask, what’s a “squarehead?”
According to urban dictionary:
I’m just saying to get on too fucking high a horse when pointing how bad Mexico is. And I’m not on border. Nor are the towns and private water wells that come to mind when I think about polluted and contaminated water either.
Come on, you know that is complete nonsense. The main part of the reason for the Amnesty Program was to get the illegal immigration problem under control. And, yes, it was rightly viewed as a problem. A problem they thought the amnesty program would fix. Part of it, we were told, was to really secure the borders and crack down on people sneaking in and overstaying their visas. Yeah, that worked real well.
Here we go again. You don’t like the information and you attempt to portray it as some crazed purely partisan position. Newsflash: There are people on the other side of the political spectrum. Just because that is where they reside doesn’t mean there positions or their information is invalid. Really, Gigo, this trick is getting old.
And a few hundred years ago the Spanish came and killed thousands of Mexicans and imposed rule and their language on them. What does this 50-150 year old history reminder have to do with the discussion?
I was pointing out some other widely based ethnic discrimination in addition to another post’s examples that were ongoing in a similar time frame. Ethnic hatred of Hispanics, which you demonstrate all the time regardless of their citizenship status, has been around for a while. You and your ilk are trying to bring it back with lies and factual omissions. You’re just the 21st century equivalent of something that is rotten to its very core.