The email bag once again has yielded up a bit of right wing propaganda (I get quite a bit of left wing propaganda, which I’ve recently covered), which this time around is rather more subtle than the norm. A good part of the reason is that it doesn’t delve into easily proven or disproven historical claims, but rather into the criminology surrounding our southern border with Mexico: that’s right, it’s pro-border wall propaganda.
I found, while researching the claims made, that criminology concerning these various claims is very underdeveloped. Some statistics are not kept at all, some are in fragmentary form, certain statistics cannot be collected because the victims do not choose to perform them, etc.
Against this background of uncertainty, these claims are made in a very positive format, which is to say, each is made, followed by an exclamatory FACT!, as if they are viable bricks in their unanswerable argument. But let’s talk about them, one by one, for evaluation purposes.
The propaganda itself is not text, but a video. While the mail I received attached it as an mp4 video, I also found it on YouTube, and will add it to the end of this post. I will transcribe the claims and answer them with the data, where available.
The section headers are mine, they are not from the propaganda, and are employed to increase readability. Any bolding in the quotes are mine, not the authors’, unless otherwise noted.
Crime Rates Of Illegal Aliens
… An illegal alien in the state of Arizona is twice as likely to commit a crime versus a natural born citizen.
The closest I could come to verifying this is a study by Dr. John Lott, Jr., who, according to the Washington Times, is President (and possibly the only employee) of the Crime Prevention Research Center. From the study’s abstract:
Using newly released detailed data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017, we are able to separate non-U.S. citizens by whether they are illegal or legal residents. Unlike other studies, these data do not rely on self-reporting of criminal backgrounds. Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans.
However, this report has come under heavy criticism. Alex Nowrasteh at the right-wing Cato Institute, for example, believes the entire paper was invalidated due to a data analysis mistake by Dr. Lott.
Lott wrote his paper based on a dataset he obtained from the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) that lists all admitted prisoners in the state of Arizona from 1985 to 2017. According to Lott, the data allowed him to identify “whether they [the prisoners] are illegal or legal residents.” This is where Lott made his small error: The dataset does not allow him or anybody else to identify illegal immigrants.
The interested reader should click through to see Mr. Nowrasteh’s analysis of the error.
Dr. Lott’s study was considered to go quite against the flow of other analyses. Non-partisan FactCheck.org’s characterization of the question of crime rates in the illegal immigrant population in the context of competing claims from Republican President Trump and Senator Sanders (I-VT) may be the most believable I ran across:
President Donald Trump said it’s “not true” that immigrants in the U.S. illegally are “safer than the people that live in the country,” providing several crime statistics he claimed represented the “toll of illegal immigration.” Sen. Bernie Sanders made the opposite claim, saying: “I understand that the crime rate among undocumented people is actually lower than the general population.”
Who is right?
There are not readily available nationwide statistics on all crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally. Researchers have provided estimates through statistical modeling or by extrapolating from smaller samples. One such study backs the president’s claim, but several others support Sanders’ statement.
FactCheck.org later cites Cato Institute research:
“Illegal immigrants are 47 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives.” (And legal immigrants are even less likely to be in jail or prison.)
All of which is based on extrapolations, estimates, etc.
This is one of those situations in which biased readers can read their own conclusions into the data, simply by refusing to believe, or disbelieve, in the research methods – and it’s easy to understand their reactions. But this simply reinforces the point I’d like to make, which is this:
Using Dr. Lott’s apparently deeply flawed study in such a positive manner as displayed in the pro-border wall propaganda is intellectually dishonest. The study is not generally accepted by Dr. Lott’s peers, insofar as I can see, and while his study may be congruent with the views of the zealots of the anti-immigrationists, this doesn’t make the study right to cite when it’s methods are flawed.
I might further note, in my own experience, that Dr. Lott’s results are often congruent with the right wing, most often in the area of gun rights, and yet those studies are often disputed and, supposedly, disproven, if I’m to believe my casual reading.
This is not to accuse Dr. Lott of publishing deliberately fraudulent research. Instead, I’d like to suggest that he’s suffering from a form of intellectual error called confirmation bias. This manifests, in my experience as a software engineer, as finding an expected result after developing some software, or an expected coding error when researching a bug, and STOPPING. That is, I found what I expected, I must be right, so let’s stop right here, proclaim victory, and go home. The proper intellectual approach for us flawed human types should be to ask, Where did I go wrong? and if you can’t find an answer to that, maybe you’re right. But, from time to time, there’s some end case you didn’t test that makes your software buggy. You didn’t find it because your test cases all worked – and you never thought of the end case that invalidates your conclusion of perfection.
I suspect Dr. Lott just isn’t as thorough as he should be.
Drug Smuggling Over The Southern Border
… 90% of all heroin and fentanyl come across the southern border.
This claim appears to be true for heroin, as United States Assistant Secretary William Brownfield reports in Briefing on the International Narcotics Control Strategy Report:
My estimate is that between 90 and 94 percent of all heroin consumed in the United States comes from Mexico. My estimate is that a very tiny percentage now, perhaps as little as 2 percent to 4 percent, comes from Colombia. And the remainder, which might be somewhere in the 4 to 6 percent category, comes from Asia, the majority of that coming from Afghanistan.
Finding numbers for fentanyl is more difficult, but let’s just stipulate our propagandist has a true fact, because concentrating on whether or not these numbers are accurate leaves the reader open to the mistake of forgetting the context. And what is the context? The conclusion that the wall will help stem the flow of drugs into the United States. In this respect, WOLA, a human rights organization advocating for Central America (Mexico is part of North America, not Central America, in their view, I think), can help:
Misconception 2: “Building a wall would greatly reduce heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, and fentanyl trafficking.”
Proponents of a border wall often claim that it would help the United States solve its opioid addiction problem by blocking heroin smugglers from Mexico. This reveals a misunderstanding of how cross-border smuggling works.
The vast majority of the drug that enters from Mexico does so through “ports of entry”—the 48 official land crossings through which millions of people, vehicles, and cargo pass every day. “Heroin seizures almost predominantly are through the port of entry and either carried in a concealed part of a vehicle or carried by an individual,” then-U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Gil Kerlikowske told a congressional committee last year. “We don’t get much heroin seized by Border Patrol coming through, I think just because there are a lot of risks to the smugglers and the difficulty of trying to smuggle it through,” he said.
“The most common method employed by Mexican TCOs [Transnational Criminal Organizations] involves transporting drugs in vehicles through U.S. ports of entry (POEs),” the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) reported in its 2016 National Drug Threat Assessment. “Illicit drugs are smuggled into the United States in concealed compartments within passenger vehicles or commingled with legitimate goods on tractor trailers,” according to the document.
The lesson here is that there are two components to evaluate in just about any argument: the data, and the logic. This propaganda, through its forceful presentation (“FACT!“), attempts a sleight of hand trick by using what does appear to be a true fact and a forceful presentation to force through a conclusion which actually doesn’t follow. The fact is relevant, but the omission of other critical facts, namely the methods for transporting the drugs, renders this propaganda fallacious and untrustworthy.
Finally, there is an implicit assumption to this argument which is, at least in my view, false, and that basis is that the problem is supply, not demand. I treated this fallacious assumption in this post here, but the argument is buried so deeply that it might discourage the reader, so permit me to quote myself for my final rebuttal to this “fact”:
Supply. [Hugh] Hewitt’s argument is that the supply of illegal drugs is the problem. Few economists will find this a reasonable argument, because the true driver is the demand. Demand, demand, demand, repeat it over and over and you soon realize that fentanyl is not the problem, it’s a symptom of a deeper malaise in our society. Whether it’s the inevitable stress of a society transitioning from the arbitrary strictures of divinities to reasoned debate concerning ethics, morality, and law, or the stress caused by manufacturing moving overseas, or the stress of a populace that often does not push itself intellectually and now finds itself in an international competition where intellect is the key to success, it needs to be explored. It may not be a resolvable matter, as sad as that makes me, but it’s important to realize that cutting supply does not eliminate the problem. It’ll be like squeezing an unpoppable balloon, the symptom will just reappear in some other form. The core problem, singular or plural, needs to be identified and, if possible, addressed.
Child Sex Trafficking
… Over 10,000 kids are illegally sex trafficked across the southern border every single year.
Whether the propagandist means the entire southern border, or the Arizona border is unclear. So are the numbers itself. Research on this topic is frustrating, and so I, once again, have a real problem with some dude shouting FACT! as if he has indisputable information. Here’s a chart from CNN on sex trafficking:
Note this isn’t child sex trafficking, this is just human trafficking, and, presuming the former is a subset of the latter, the numbers simply don’t add up.
Of course, an argument can be made that one case is one too many, but this would once again losing focus on the context. Whether or not the numbers are right, why should we believe a wall will be effective? We have reports of people being carried in 18-wheelers, which means crossing at ports of entry. Walls can be tunneled under, they can be climbed.
Even if it’s just one child, it’s a sad situation. But are we building a wall because it’ll stop people who are determined to supply a tragic demand here in our own backyards, or because it’ll satisfy the vanity of a President who promised to build one – and then couldn’t convince his own Party to fund it? This may be the strongest claim of the video, and yet it’s easy to question the facts and the logic it uses to support the wall. Indeed, if we were to build a wall, what would happen to those children who do encounter the wall? Left to die by the traffickers?
Federal Prison Populations
We have 56,000 illegal immigrants in our federal prison system.
The first real fact to remember is that most illegal immigrants do not tramp through the southern border. Most come in legally on visas and then do not leave when they should. This suggests that 56,000 – or whatever might be the true number – is grossly exaggerating the contribution of those who come through the southern border.
That said, Preston Huennekens of the Center for Immigration Studies (“Low-immigratin, Pro-immigrant”) reports, in an article entitled “DOJ: 26% of Federal Prisoners Are Aliens” …
At the end of the first quarter of FY 2018, there were 57,820 known or suspected aliens in federal custody. Within the report itself, the numbers are analyzed respective to the holding entity (BOP [Bureau of Prisons] or USMS [US Marshal Service]).
This is, perhaps, the source of the numbers in the propaganda. How many of them came over the southern border, rather than waltzing in on tourist visas? We don’t know.
Because of lack of reporting of relevant statistics, those in state custody is not known.
But because there are many ways into the United States, we can be fairly sure that 56,000 is far too high an estimate of the number of incarcerated illegal aliens from the southern border.
Federal Prison Costs
135 Billion dollars a year, that’s how much is the financial burden on U.S. taxpayers every single year that illegal immigrants drain from our system.
When it comes to the financial burden of these prisoners, it seems to me that the U.S. Government Accountability Office‘s statistics might be the best source of information. This particular report is dated July 2018, so it’s not out of date.
GAO’s analyses found that the total annual estimated federal costs to incarcerate criminal aliens decreased from about $1.56 billion to about $1.42 billion from fiscal years 2010 through 2015. These costs included federal prison costs and reimbursements to state prison and local jail systems for a portion of their costs. GAO’s analyses also show that selected annual estimated operating costs of state prison systems to incarcerate SCAAP criminal aliens decreased from about $1.17 billion to about $1.11 billion from fiscal years 2010 through 2015. These selected costs included correctional officer salaries, medical care, food service, and utilities.
This is so low that I actually wonder if it’s accurate, but keep in mind this is Federal cost and some State costs. But it remains plain that the experts’ estimate is two magnitudes lower than our propagandists’ estimates. Given the slipperiness with which his other claims have been delivered, a sober reader must give the benefit of the doubt to the folks who are professionals, paid to find the truth – not the propagandist with an agenda to push.
But much more importantly is the failure to bring the entire context to light. Sure, illegal aliens in prisons cost us money. But how about illegal aliens who are quietly working for a living and paying taxes? Our happy little propagandist somehow fails to present the balanced case, but PBS does cover it.
In general, more people working means more taxes — and that’s true overall with undocumented immigrants as well. Undocumented immigrants pay an estimated $11.6 billion a year in taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation & Economic Policy.
