Lower the crime rate, yes. Adding in additional people would increase the actual number of crimes, unless the people in your “Group B” commit no crimes at all.
Please note that I think Ancient Erudite is full of it on the topic, but the argument seems to be that one crime against a legal U.S. citizen, committed by an illegal immigrant, is one too many.
Correct. But the crime *rate *is what you care about. If 10 murders a year are committed, that matters a crapton more to you personally if you live in a town of 100 residents versus a city of 1 million people. If the city population doubles to 2 million people, but 15 murders a year are now committed, this is a substantial improvement in the personal chance that you will be a victim of murder.
You are absolutely correct here.
However…
Your typical Trump/Wall fan is not very good at numeracy skills, and this talk of “rate” and percentages, and probability is quite, quite confusing for them. This talk of yours will make them think “huh, who does this smarty pants think he is? Some kind of elitist? I know I am right.”
Again, data, logic, facts and analysis are simply beyond their ability to comprehend. You can put forth the best argument all day long, and they will simply look at you like a golden retriever when you hide his ball.
I get what kenobi 65 is getting at. We might care about the crime rate, but the OP possibly doesn’t mind if more legal citizens are murdered, as long as none of those murders are by illegal citizens. Reading their argument in the kindest possible way they are presenting a sort of trolley problem. Along one track 50 US citizens are murdered in the US by US citizens. Along the other track 45 US citizens are murdered by US citizens, 1 US citizen is murdered by an illegal immigrant, and 5 illegal immigrants are murdered by US citizens.
The OP prefers track one, not because fewer people are murdered in total*, but because the specific person who was murdered by a illegal immigrant would have lived.
*which probably isn’t true anyway, as we haven’t included these non-immigrants being murdered in their own communities due to the perfect immigration prevention of “The Wall” ™.
(Allow me to repeat my earlier post. This is identical to a post of Ancient Erudite’s, except for the phrase “left-handed people.”)
I’m not authorized to speak for Mr. Erudite, but I assume he distinguishes between wholesome American crimes committed by god-fearing freedom-loving Americans and the putrid evil of wetbacks.
Suppose you were a good ol’ Trump-loving American woman in Texas; what would you choose if the choices were
(a) being raped by a good ol’ American boy who loves Trump just as much as you do and goes to an American church on Sunday, or
(b) having your purse snatched by a brown-skinned Guatemalan who doesn’t even speak English.
(I’m afraid to guess what the answer would be.)
Well put! I was going to try to put together a post just like this, but you beat me to it.
(Come to think of it, this affects me personally…nearly 40 years ago, I was directly devastated by an incident that may have been perpetrated by a Guatemalan immigrant (not sure if he was ever ‘out-of-status’/undocumented/illegal)…and did that factoid matter to me? Not in the least.
More info here – not that anyone would be interested: https://www.nytimes.com/1984/06/03/nyregion/questions-still-linger-in-stouffer-s-fire.html)
This estimate states that the shutdown cost the country 6 billion dollars. Trump spent 6 billion in an effort to get 5 billion and he walks away with fucking zero. Genius.
Y’know if we didn’t respond this thread would slowly drift to the bottom of the forum and we wouldn’t need to explain for the fiftieth fucking thread in a row why the wall is a bad idea to someone who is clearly utterly uninterested in hearing it.
But yes, good on you for recognizing the one valuable lesson from this shutdown: government employees do important, valuable work, and attempts to fuck with them are performed at the peril of whoever is in office. This is why your side has been so fucking eager to kill unions. Because otherwise, the people you grind into the dirt will collectively say, “fuck this” and you’ll have to deal with that reality.
And what “problems” does illegal immigration bring?
Besides of course: cheaper produce, cleaner hotel rooms, and a more robust Social Security fund.
They *dont *bring: more crime. The commit *less crime *than us born here citizens do.
It’s not a fact. Got a real unbiased cite?
*Research Showing Lower Crime Rates
Alex Nowrasteh, with the libertarian Cato Institute, analyzed the Texas data to make a comparison of immigrants in the country illegally and native-born residents. In a recent post he noted that in 2015 Texas police made 815,689 arrests of native-born Americans, 37,776 arrests of immigrants in the country illegally and 20,323 arrests of legal immigrants. Given the relative populations for each group, he wrote, “The arrest rate for illegal immigrants was 40 percent below that of native-born Americans.”
In addition, he wrote, the homicide arrest rate for native-born Americans was “about 46 percent higher than the illegal immigrant homicide arrest rate.”
Other research from the Cato Institute attempted to provide national estimates. A study published on June 4 used data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey for 2016 and applied statistical modeling to estimate the number of incarcerated immigrants in the country illegally. It filtered the data using characteristics correlated with being an immigrant in the country illegally, such as whether someone is a noncitizen but has not served in the military or received Social Security income. The research concluded: “Illegal immigrants are 47 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives.” (And legal immigrants are even less likely to be in jail or prison.)
*Now, four academic studies show that illegal immigration does not increase the prevalence of violent crime or drug and alcohol problems. In the slew of research, motivated by Trump’s rhetoric, social scientists set out to answer this question: Are undocumented immigrants more likely to break the law?
Michael Light, a criminologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, looked at whether the soaring increase in illegal immigration over the last three decades caused a commensurate jump in violent crimes: murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.
“Increased undocumented immigration since 1990 has not increased violent crime over that same time period,” Light said in a phone interview.
Those findings are published in the current edition of the peer-reviewed journal Criminology.*
Why isn’t the OP much more concerned about the shutdown and it’s very effective slackening of security at airports? The terrorists that actually HAVE attacked on US soil entered through airports. Every one. NOT the southern border.
Stop pretending this is about your country’s security.
(And just admit you don’t want more brown people!)
The trouble with your reply here is that, so far as I know, almost none of the crimes he’s complaining of are attributed to people who have overstayed visas. So you’re really not answering the issue.
The way to answer the issue is this: the solution to your “problem” is to solve the underlying causes of “illegal immigration”. Building a “wall” does not do that, because people will still enter the country illegally. Further, solving a societal issue using an immoral or un-American method is not what we’re supposed to be about.
Not that it matters; people who buy into the President’s “emergency” aren’t bothered with subtle, rational thoughts to begin with, in my experience. 
This is an odd bit of precision to attempt to add to the claim “100,000 illegals have hurt Americans”. The number is of course entirely fabricated, and the OP refuses to provide any cites or support for it, so there’s nothing to keep us from assuming that they’re all H-2B overstayers working at Mar-a-Lago.
I just couldn’t let this one pass, because it shows how a lack of facts can distort one’s entire understanding of the situation.
Faact: Reagan’s air traffic controllers went on strike. There were a lot of things leading up to that, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s stick with the bare essential.
Fact: Air traffic controllers were not allowed to go on strike. Specifically, they violated 5 U.S.C. (Supp. III 1956) 118p. Reagan ordered them to go back to work.
Fact: About 90% of them refused to go back to work, and Reagan fired them.
Which has nothing at all to do with with the present situation, so please keep it out of your future arguments.
Heck, in the days after the attack, it was widely speculated that they’d come in over your northern border.
I think some people still believe it.
Getting back to the spirit of the OP and ignoring all of the factual errors, even supposing continuing to hold the government hostage was a good idea and the the President had the power to start paying the air traffic controllers and TSA agents. It still wouldn’t have worked. the airline industry just happened to be the first of a whole host of government services that was reaching a breaking point. Fixing that might have given you maybe an extra week but the you would have Food stamps not going out. Meat and produce not being inspected. Border agents walking off the job, federal court cases not being heard, critial fianancial information not being delivered etc. etc. Pretty soon you are having to open up every office in the government piecemeal at which point why did you close it in the first place.
‘An Albanian murdered a Serb. That Serb would still be alive if there were no more Albanians. When will the government finally protect Serbs from the Albanians?’
Actually, a more law-abiding group can lower the crime rate for everyone. For example, by not tolerating criminal behavior by, eg, calling police when they see criminal behavior, forming neighborhood watches, providing eyewitness evidence when crimes occur, etc. Their behavior lowers the payoff to criminality and increases the risk of punishment. Immigrants with low crime rates** reduce the amount of crimes of neighborhoods they move to.**
Basically, it’s not simply additive. Attitudes toward crime have a huge impact on crime rates, and there are actual studies showing that large numbers of immigrants make crime rates fall among non-immigrants. It’s been shown that in areas with large immigrant populations, the crime rate drops by more than enough to offset the number of additional crimes committed by immigrants.
Guys named Doug do crime, right? That’s why all the Beware of Doug signs? Let’s get rid of Dougs.