Do illegal immigrants kill more Americans each year than insurgents do in Iraq? Because the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics don’t include a category that tracks homicides committed by foreign nationals, it’s impossible to say with certainty.
But a statistical analysis just released by the Family Security Foundation estimates that anywhere between 1,806 and 2,510 Americans are killed each yearby foreign nationals here illegally, compared with a total of 3,155 deaths in Iraq the Pentagon has reported since the March 2003 invasion. The homicide estimate is based on available crime data, the 267,000 illegal immigrants currently incarcerated, and the total number of illegals now thought to be in the United States.
Referring to a 2005 Government Accountability Office report to Congress that put the federal cost of incarcerating “criminal aliens” from 2001 to 2004 at $5.8 billion, Family Security Foundation adviser and former Immigration and Naturalization Service senior agent Mike Cutler told The Examiner he believes the homicide estimate is “very conservative,” adding his former colleagues in law enforcement are in “a state of white heat over this.”
Another study released by the Immigration Policy Center, a pro-immigration group, found that immigrants do not increase crime, and that the incarceration rate for U.S.-born men aged 18 to 39 is five times higher than for immigrants. However, the same study noted that the U.S.-born children and grandchildren of some 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants now in the U.S. are at much greater risk of turning to crime, a phenomenon the study called the “paradox of assimilation.”
Forty percent of all illegal immigrants don’t sneak over the Mexican border. They walk right into the U.S. through our myriad ports of entry and then disappear into the population when their temporary visas expire. The federal government, which has granted immigration benefits to thousands of legal immigrants without performing basic national security checks, is even less disposed to investigate people who are supposed to be here for only a short period of time. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff recently admitted that there is no “exit control” in place to make sure visa holders leave when they’re supposed to. It’s no surprise that many do not.
The Republican administration champions thecheap labor illegal immigration provides without bothering to add up the social costs of letting millions of undocumented workers into the country, while Hill Democrats salivate at the thought of millions of new voters who would likely be sympathetic to their party. With no official crime data available, both the White House and Democrats in Congress are forced to rely on competing studies like those cited above to determine whether or not the nation’s current open-borders policy is actually more lethal to Americans than the conflict in Iraq.
One would think that getting a definitive answer to this question in order to guide future immigration policy decisions would be at the top of everybody’s to-do list. But it isn’t, probably because none of them really want to know the answer.
