Media mogul Rupert Murdoch inserted himself into the debate over crime rates in the U.S. illegal immigrant population with a series of tweets in recent days. Murdoch pushed two debunked arguments defending the claim that illegal immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born citizens of the United States.
Mexican immigrants, as with all immigrants, have much lower crime rates than native born. Eg El Paso safest city in U.S. Trump wrong.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) July 12, 2015
ElPaso safest city in U.S. with over 500,000 population in 2010,11,,12 and 13. Figures to come for 2014.
— Rupert Murdoch (@rupertmurdoch) July 13, 2015
Murdoch critiqued Donald Trump’s statements about illegal immigrants who come from or through Mexico to enter the U.S. by using partial data based on mostly legal immigrants, which for reasons later described in this article, renders the data useless in any discussion of illegal immigrants. Murdoch also asserted that El Paso, Texas was the safest city in the U.S., despite its location on the U.S.-Mexico border. This assertion has also been debunked based on the fact that it relies on an outdated system of crime reporting from local authorities that excludes most of the crimes that anecdotal data reveals illegal immigrants who come from or through Mexico to most often be associated with.
Breitbart Texas published an article this week showing the deceptive means news organizations have utilized to attack Trump’s comments. The article explains how by intentionally interchanging the terms “immigrant” and “illegal immigrant,” Trump’s detractors battle a strawman. They cite studies focused on all immigrants, not just illegal aliens who enter the U.S. secretly and illegally. They mix crime statistics from legal immigrants with the far-fewer number of illegal immigrants in the United States, causing the crime numbers to look better for illegal immigrants. We wrote:
By shifting the conversation to include all “foreign born” people in the United States, the illegal immigration apologist crowd dilutes the numbers of crimes committed per capita in the U.S. illegal alien population by adding 300 percent more people to the mix. The 300 percent being added are legal immigrants. Legal immigrants often must have a clean record to be legal immigrants and they have already exhibited a tendency to follow rules and laws—even at great personal expense to themselves. Adding them with the illegal alien population dilutes the crime numbers and percentages to the point that they no longer represent the reality discussed and debated.
The claim of El Paso being the safest city in the U.S. was also debunked by another recent Breitbart Texas article. We outlined how public officials and local newspapers in El Paso, Texas often claim that their city is safe, but that the claims are based on a very particular criteria that excludes most of the offenses tied to Mexican drug cartels and the illegal immigrants in the U.S. who are involved with them.
The claims of a safe border are based on the FBI Uniform Crime Report which looks ONLY at the number of murders, forcible rape, burglary, aggravated assault, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson.
The outdated way of collecting data does not take into account kidnapping, drug trafficking, human trafficking, extortion and other offenses that have become synonymous of Mexican cartel activity. Officials in those border cities choose to ignore these facts when referring to their crime statistics.
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