Steven Hayward:
A lot of my libertarian friends, especially at the currently drifting but once-great Cato Institute, like to defend their clueless open-borders disposition by pointing to statistics that purport to demonstrate that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans. Even if you assume the crime statistics are complete and accurate these days (and usually it is libertarians who express doubt that our law enforcement bureaucracy reports accurately), it misses two points obvious to a first-grader, but not apparently to the pre-school mentality of some libertarians: if we actually controlled our borders, the crime rate from illegal immigrants would be near-zero, whatever the actual prevalence. (Just ask Laken Riley, who would be alive right now if we did have serious border control.) But second, the true illegal immigrant crime rate is 100%; it’s indicated in the title itself. Duh.
# posted by Ranger @ 9:27 AM
