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Do illegal immigrants commit more crimes than law-abiding residents?

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Policeman investigates crime scene for evidence
Policeman investigates crime scene for evidence

I’ve had people on the left tell me that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than law-abiding US residents, so when I came across this article from the Daily Signal, I knew I had to share it. They managed to get hold of a Department of Justice report featuring a comprehensive breakdown of all crimes committed. And they even go over local crimes rates for illegal immigrants.

Here’s Hans Von Spakovsky writing for the Daily Signal:

Opponents of federal efforts to enforce the immigration laws enacted by Congress repeatedly claim that illegal immigrants are “less likely” to commit crimes than U.S. citizens—and thus represent no threat to public safety.

But that’s not true when it comes to federal crimes.

Noncitizens constitute only about 7% of the U.S. population. Yet the latest data from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics reveals that noncitizens accounted for nearly two-thirds (64%) of all federal arrests in 2018. Just two decades earlier, only 37% of all federal arrests were noncitizens.

These arrests aren’t just for immigration crimes. Noncitizens accounted for 24% of all federal drug arrests, 25% of all federal property arrests, and 28% of all federal fraud arrests.

In 2018, a quarter of all federal drug arrests took place in the five judicial districts along the U.S.-Mexico border. This reflects the ongoing activities of Mexican drug cartels. Last year, Mexican citizens accounted for 40% of all federal arrests.

In fact, more Mexicans than U.S. citizens were arrested on charges of committing federal crimes in 2018.

Migrants from Central American countries are also accounting for a larger share of federal arrests, going from a negligible 1% of such arrests in 1998 to 20% today.

Now, people on the left like to say that of course illegal immigrants commit more federal crimes, because their federal crimes mostly involve immigration violations. I don’t know about you, but that list of arrests didn’t sound like “mostly immigration violations” to me.

Anyway, we actually do have numbers for border states regarding local crimes committed. Here’s an example from a very well-known border state:

A recent report from the Texas Department of Public Safety revealed that 297,000 noncitizens had been “booked into local Texas jails between June 1, 2011 and July 31, 2019.” So these are noncitizens who allegedly committed local crimes, not immigration violations.

The report noted that a little more than two-thirds (202,000) of those booked in Texas jails were later confirmed as illegal immigrants by the federal government.

According to the Texas report, over the course of their criminal careers those illegal immigrants were charged with committing 494,000 criminal offenses.

Some of these cases are still being prosecuted, but the report states that there have already been over 225,000 convictions. Those convictions represent: 500 homicides; 23,954 assaults; 8,070 burglaries; 297 kidnappings; 14,178 thefts; 2,026 robberies; 3,122 sexual assaults; 3,840 sexual offenses; 3,158 weapon charges; and tens of thousands of drug and obstruction charges

These statistics reveal the very real danger created by sanctuary policies. In nine self-declared sanctuary states and numerous sanctuary cities and counties, officials refuse to hand over criminals who are known to be in this country illegally after they have served their state or local sentences.

OK, that’s not so good. And remember, none of those illegal aliens need to be here. We have methods for allowing immigrants to come here legally, and those methods also allow us to to keep out people who are dangerous to residents who pay taxes.

Here’s an example from the Daily Caller of some recent crimes (all in August) that were committed in a Democrat-dominated sanctuary area:

A sixth illegal immigrant was arrested in Montgomery County, Maryland, this month for sex crimes; this time, a Salvadoran national accused of molesting a 12-year-old girl and her younger brother.

Nestor Lopez-Guzman, 21, was arrested by Montgomery County Police on Aug. 18. A friend of the 12-year-old victim told a school counselor that her friend had been molested by Lopez-Guzman, according to the police report. The victim then confirmed that the abuse had been occurring over the past six months.

[…]Five other illegal immigrants have been arrested in Montgomery County, Maryland, since July 25 on sex crime-related charges. On Aug. 14, for example, ICE issued a detainer against Salvadoran national Nelson Reyes-Medrano, who is accused of raping a 16-year-old girl at knifepoint. In another case in the last month, two illegal immigrants were charged with repeatedly raping an 11-year-old.

Now, if you ask Democrats what their plan is to protect law-abiding taxpayers from criminals like this, they’ll say that their plan is to make law-abiding taxpayers pay for all the health care of illegal immigrants. No, really, that’s literally their plan. As for the children being raped, their answer is “we don’t care”.

These sorts of crimes will stop when the victims of these crimes are allowed to sue the Democrat politicians who allow open borders and sanctuary cities.

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Canadian government cuts funding to hospital that refused to kill patients

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Price of healthcare per Canadian household (Source: Fraser Institute)
Price of healthcare per Canadian household (Source: Fraser Institute)

It’s election time in the United States, and many of the Democrat candidate are putting forward government-run health care as an improvement to our current system. Candidates like Bernie Sanders are pointing to the “success” of health care in countries like Canada. I’ve blogged previously about single-payer health care in Canada, but this new story from last week even shocked me.

Catholic News Agency reported:

A hospice in Canada has lost its funding and is being forced to close after refusing to offer and perform medically assisted suicides.

The Irene Thomas Hospice in Delta, British Columbia, will lose $1.5 million in funding and will no longer be permitted to operate as a hospice as of February 25, 2021. Fraser Health Authority, one of the six public health care authorities in the province, announced on Tuesday that it would be ending its relationship with the hospice over its refusal to provide medically assisted deaths to its patients.

Per Fraser Health’s contract with the Delta Hospice Society, which administers the Irene Thomas Hospice, a one-year notice had to be provided before funding could be withdrawn without cause.

“We have made every effort to support the board to come into compliance and they have been clear that they have no intention to,” said British Columbia Health Minister Adrian Dix in a statement.

Government-run health care is very popular in Canada, even with many self-described Catholics. They probably couldn’t foresee that handing all the money for health care to the government would cause them to have to choose between being fired from their jobs and killing innocent people. Fortunately, they chose to leave their jobs in order to not kill innocent people. I would expect that people in Nazi Germany or Communist USSR were faced with similar choices: kill others or starve.

Health care in Canada

So, it’s important to understand how health care works in Canada. You pay into a system based on your ability to earn, and then when you need care, you get in line behind people who never paid. That’s called “equality” and “fairness”. You can’t pay a doctor directly to get faster or better care, because in a single payer system, paying a doctor to get immediate or better treatment is illegal.

So while you’re waiting in line, who decides whether you get treated? The secular leftists in government decide, because they decide what the government will pay for. You work and pay into the system. You pay the salaries of the government workers. And then they dole out health care as they see fit, according to their secular leftist worldviews.

If you need an abortion, that’s free and taxpayer-funded. Drug needles? They’re free. In vitro fertilization? You get two rounds for free. Sex-reassignment surgery? That’s free too. But if you’re old, then you might not get any treatment. After all, your days of voting are behind you. Many people die on waiting lists, especially poor people who can’t fly to America for better care. That’s Canadian health care.

People die on waiting lists in Canada

Here’s an example, reported in the UK Daily Mail:

A girl who died of leukemia was given a final send off after her friends signed her casket with loving messages on January 30.

[…]Laura might have experienced a few more milestones if a Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, hospital had been able to accommodate a bone marrow transplant for the young woman.

Numerous donors were a match with Laura and ready to donate, but Hamilton’s Juravinski Hospital didn’t have enough beds in high-air-pressure rooms for the procedure.

Hospital staff told her they had about 30 patients with potential donors, but the means to only do about five transplants a month.

[…]Dr. Ralph Meyer, Juravinski’s vice-president of oncology and palliative care, told Ontario’s TheStar.com there are plenty of others facing the same situation as Laura in Canada.

It just wasn’t important for the government of Canada to spend a lot of money buying one vote. It was much more cost-effective for them to spend a little bit of money on many voters who just needed birth control and abortions. There are a lot of votes to buy from people making reckless decisions with sex. But they don’t have the money for one expensive cancer patient. They let her die because they didn’t need her vote to get re-elected.

And keep in mind, her parents wouldn’t have been able to pay the doctors to do anything. They paid for all the health care they got through their taxes. And those taxes were used to pay for all the people who needed birth control, abortions, sex changes, IVF, etc. When it was time for the government to pay for their daughter, the government had no money left to save her. And her parents had no money left to take her to America, because they trusted the atheist elites in the government to provide their family with health care. That’s why they paid them up front with their taxpayer dollars.

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Are there any consequences to taxpayers who live in “Sanctuary Cities”

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Crime rates in major cities, all Democrat-run
Crime rates in major cities, all run by Democrat mayors

I thought this story from the weekend was very interesting. Chicago is well known as a far left city. They have the toughest restrictions on legal firearm ownership and self-defense. They are extremely soft on criminals. And they are also a “sanctuary city”. That means that they refuse to cooperate with federal law enforcement when they are dealing with illegal immigrants with criminal convictions.

Here’s the story from the Daily Wire:

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is on the defensive this weekend after Immigrations and Customs Enforcement announced that a convicted felon, now facing charges of sexually assaulting a toddler in a downtown Chicago McDonalds bathroom, was supposed to have been turned over to ICE and deported — and had been deported before.

“ICE said in a news release Thursday [Christopher] Puente was placed into Chicago police custody in June of 2019 after he was arrested for theft,” according to a Chicago ABC affiliate. “According to ICE, Chicago police were expected to hold Puente until he could be taken into their custody, as Puente was expected to be deported.”

Because Chicago is a so-called “Sanctuary City” and has lenient bail policies, Puente was released back into the community.

Puente is now charged with raping a 3-year-old girl in the bathroom of Chicago’s landmark “Rock & Roll McDonalds,” a major tourist destination just north of the city’s downtown, and just west of its “Magnificent Mile” shopping district. Puente allegedly lured the girl away from her father, who was attending to the girl’s brother inside a bathroom stall. Puente, police say, dragged the girl into his stall, locked the door, molested and assaulted her. The girl’s father, alerted by her screams, rescued her, but could not catch Puente, CPD says, who bolted from the bathroom and out the door of the McDonalds, into the street.

[…]Chicago’s branch of ICE says “Puente had been deported to Mexico in 2014 over a prior burglary conviction, but tried to get back in five days later, claiming to be a citizen, and later skipped out on a hearing before an immigration judge. He was ordered deported again in 2017 in absentia,” according to CBS Chicago.

“Puente has been previously convicted of burglary, forgery, trespassing, domestic battery and related offenses and has a record dating back 20 years,” CBS noted.

This sort of thing happens all the time in sanctuary cities. Here is one from earlier from New York City, another sanctuary city, run by another far-left Democrat mayor.

New York Post reports:

Federal officials on Tuesday blamed Mayor de Blasio for a fatal sex attack on a 92-year-old Queens woman — saying his “sanctuary city” policy kept the accused killer from being held for deportation last year.

“It was a deadly choice to release a man on an active ICE detainer back onto the streets after his first arrest included assault and weapon charges, and he now faces new charges, including murder,” said Thomas Decker, New York field-office director of enforcement and removal operations for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“New York City’s sanctuary policies continue to threaten the safety of all residents of the five boroughs as they repeatedly protect criminal aliens who show little regard for the laws of this nation.”

ICE said it lodged a detainer request with the NYPD for Reeaz Khan, an illegal immigrant from Guyana, on Nov. 27 — the same day he was busted for allegedly attacking his dad during a fight in their South Richmond Hill home.

Now I have a  friend who calls himself a Christian but who votes Demcorat, and he thinks that Democrat policies on immigration are very compassionate and generous. Whenever I ask him about cases like this he says “illegal immigrants are no more violent than natural born Americans”. That’s a false statement, and I’ve blogged about the statistics on that before. But the more important point is this: none of the illegal immigrants should be here to commit these crimes. The crimes committed by people who are here legally cannot be prevented by kicking them out. They belong here. But the crimes committed by illegal immigrants never have to happen in the first place, because they shouldn’t even be here. That’s the important point that the compassion crowd always seems to forget.

Also, where is the compassion of the victims of these criminals from people on the left? Or do law-abiding taxpaying Americans count for less than criminal illegal aliens?