Republican National Convention - Cleveland style (3 Viewers)

[HellToupee]

15 minutes til my man Hannity 

Dinesh D'Souza coming up on Megyn Kelly.Nice lead in

 

[PlasmaDogPlasma]

15 minutes til my man Hannity 

Is this your answer to Twitter quote posts? TV Guide posts

 

[Psychopav]

Master Chef is pretty gross tonight.

Go Trump! 

 

[sho nuff]

And apparently too much exposure to him will degrade the typing skills of good folks like sho nuff.  Isn't it time we put a stop to this far too long running national farce before others get hurt?

Or quick typing on a phone while barely having a connection at the lake for the weekend.

 

[Ditkaless Wonders]

OK let's get back to this now. First off, I need to correct you. When you wrote "Tim knows this but steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it"- that's not true. It really never occurred to me, until you brought it up, that incarceration rates are not tantamount to crime rates, and in fact I have no way of knowing that it isn't. Even if the rate of incarceration doesn't exactly match the crime rate, I'd be pretty surprised if it was way off in terms of percentage of illegal immigrants. 

Second, it's not one study I have used to back me up. I have listed several studies, one after another, about illegal immigrants and violent crime, and they all suggest the same conclusion, that by percentage, illegal immigrants commit less violent crime than do native born Americans.

Now let me add two points that you did not address, but others did in their response to me:

1. Several people noted that illegal immigrants are, by definition illegal; therefore they are criminals. First off, the act of entering this country illegally is a misdemeanor, so it's ridiculous to regard them as criminals on the level of serious law breakers, who commit felonies. Second and more importantly, I was discussing violent crime (as was Donald Trump last night therefore, the act of being illegal in this country is irrelevant to whether or not they commit violent crimes once here. 

2. Others pointed out that many of the statistics I have cited combine legal immigrants and illegal immigrants. This is true. Unfortunately we don't have good separate statistics on illegal immigrants unless they get caught doing something wrong- obviously they're not about to respond to polls or surveys. However, and this goes back to my response to DW's point, we DO know how many illegals are incarcerated for violent crimes, and that gives us some indication of what percentage of them actually commit said crimes. And if that number is consistently lower than native born Americans we can reach some conclusions- conclusions which are the exact opposite of what Donald Trump implied last night. 

We have had this discussion previously.

Incarceration, absent wrongful incarceration, takes an incident, reporting of the incident, and successful prosecution of the incident to lead to incarceration.  How frequently incidents happen I do not know.  What I do know is that there are any number of programs to try to encourage illegal aliens to report criminality committed against them because advocates for that community tell us that these crimes are massively under-reported.  Often these crimes are committed by others in their immediate community but are not reported, except anecdotally, because illegals who have been victimized sometimes (often?) fear that during the process of reporting the crime they themselves will end up deported.  They suffer crime quietly so as to not come to the attention of authorities fearing that will lead to their deportation.  There is a strong consensus to this phenomenon being the case in law enforcement and by advocates for this community.

In those instances where the crime is reported there is, occasionally, some loss of the availability of witnesses before trial. Sometimes they voluntarily return to their countries of origin, sometimes they are intimidated from testimony, sometimes they move, and living in the shadows are difficult to locate for trial.  This presents an additional and substantial challenge to successful prosecution.  There is in fact a special visa program to extend visas for such witnesses under some circumstances, basically congress having recognized that numerous crimes were not being successfully prosecuted due to witness/victim availability. (Google "U visa")

Long and short, I do not know what an accurate rate for criminality of illegal aliens may be,  no one does.  I suspect it is not statistically different than for most other demographics but I do not know. I do not believe as Trump implies that it is substantially higher than other groups.  I do not believe most things that spill from Trump's mouth or Twitter account.  What I do know, however, is that the argument you made , that we know it to be lower, is in no way conclusively established and is probably not even well supported.

In the end I find the entire line of argumentation irrelevant.  It is a distraction.  One either believes in controlled and lawful immigration or one doesn't.  Me, I note two opposing circumstances.  First, the history of humanity has been one of migration for a great deal of our time.  Second, Nation states have borders and the vast majority of them control immigration to their countries and obtaining citizenship.