Porterville Recorder

The truth is scary to some…

- Raoul Lowery Contreras is a conservati­ve columnist. His column appears on Fridays in The Recorder. He can be contacted at hispanicco­mmentator@gmail. com.

For those that hide in their basements and closets, arm themselves with shotguns, and lose sleep night after night because there is an illegal alien crime wave led by gangsters from El Salvador — vicious gangsters in President Trump’s “MS-13”— you can rest, there isn’t an illegal alien crime wave, and MS-13 barely exists.

Mr. Trump’s MS-13: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called MS-13 the most brutal of the gangs driving the drug trade… experts have found the gang has barely any role in the internatio­nal drug trade. The Congressio­nal Research Service said that it could be misleading to call MS-13 a transnatio­nal criminal organizati­on at all, because it has no central leader or global ambitions.” In a phrase, MS-13 is no “Mexican Mafia,” a real gang.

In fact, MS-13 has about 10,000 members, the same as Newsweek’s “…most dangerous gang in America” (MS-13) had in 2005. The math: law enforcemen­t estimates there are 1.4 “million” documented gang-members nationwide. 10,000 divided by 1.4 million is 0.007 percent.

Big deal, Mr. President.

Trump Suprema supporter, “anorexic-looking” writer Ann Coulter wrote in her book “Adios America” that there are 36-million illegal aliens in the United States. That is three times the accepted estimates of the Trump Administra­tion, Pew Research and most observers and commentato­rs who study the situation. Fox’s Tucker Carlson, promotes a bogus study from some graduate student at MIT and two Yale professors that claims their research indicates 22 million illegal aliens in the U.S.

Now, let us get back to illegal alien crime. We’ve disposed of the MS-13 myth perpetrate­d by the Trump Administra­tion, but what about President Trump’s claim at a rally on Monday, November 5, the day before the mid-term election, that 1800 Americans (a year? He didn’t say) are killed by illegal aliens — the kind walking through Mexico to the U.S. in a “caravan” from Central America.

President Trump has no idea how many Americans are killed by illegal aliens. No one does. But there are two other numbers kicked around by those who are virulently hostile to immigrants, legal and illegal.

One is by controvers­ial Iowa Congressma­n Steve King, who endorsed a White Supremacis­t for Mayor of Toronto, Canada and the other by Mary Ann Mendoza (she is not Hispanic, her name is), whose police officer son was killed in his patrol car when a drunken illegal alien crashed his vehicle into the patrol car.

King claimed in a 2006 speech that “12 Americans” a day would live if illegals weren’t in the U.S. That is 4,380 a year. Mary Ann Mendoza claims she came up with 63,000 American deaths at the hands of illegal aliens since 2001. King came up with his figure out of thin air.

Mendoza, obviously not a researcher, relied on a study conducted by the Government Accountabi­lity Office published in 2011 that studied 1000 prison and local jail inmates who were foreign born (no distinctio­n as to legal residency) and incarcerat­ed between 2004 and 2008. She arrived at the 63,000 by adding the years 2001-2004 and 2008 until 2016 on her own, calculatin­g the 63,000 figure without any input from government sources.

In other words, 63,000 is fantasy, just as King’s 12 Americans murdered daily is.

Real numbers from the state of Texas related by CATO Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh:

“In 2016, 746 native-born Texans, 32 illegal immigrants, and 28 legal immigrants were convicted of homicide. In that year, the homicide conviction rate for native-born Americans in Texas was 3.2 per 100,000 natives while it was 1.8 per 100,000 illegal immigrants and 0.9 per 100,000 legal immigrants (Figure 1). The illegal immigrant conviction rate for homicide was 44 percent below that of native-born Americans in 2016 in Texas.”

Imagine that. Now add in the bogus estimates of illegal aliens in the U.S. by Ann Coulter’s 36 million illegal aliens and VOILA! The 1.8 per 100,000 illegal aliens actually convicted in Texas of murder would be — using Coulter’s figure — 0.6 per 100,000. That’s one-fifth of native born Americans.

Or, as the highly paid anti-immigrant Executive Director of the suspect Center for Immigratio­n Studies Mark Krikorian admits, “A lot of data does suggest immigrants are less likely to be involved in crime.”

Congressma­n King? Ms. Mendoza? Mr. Trump?

 ??  ?? The Right Side Raoul Lowery Contreras
The Right Side Raoul Lowery Contreras

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