The author made two serious errors with simple math:
“Adult illegal aliens represented 3.1 percent of the total adult population of the country in 2003. By comparison, the illegal alien prison population represented a bit more than 4.54 percent of the overall prison population.”
According to that quote, illegal immigrants are incarcerated a rate that is 1.1 percent higher than their population, which means that the incarceration rate among illegal aliens are extremely low as Rivera suggested to O’Reilly.
No, per the figures cited they are incarcerated at a rate 46% (4.54/3.1 = 1.46) more than the general population.
Further more, this low incarceration rate for illegal immigrants is based on an estimate of 7 million adult illegal immigrants in the US in 2000.
He's wrong again! First the original study used figures from 2003, the author for some odd reason came up with the year 2000. Per the US census bureau the US population in 2003 was estimated at around (293,655,404) 3.1 percent of that would be 9.1 million not 7 million.
The author, by committing two very simple math calculations, has shot his credibility and should not be discussing statistics.
One other thing, US citizens (save for those who obtained citizenship after the patriot act..) can not be deported. Typically criminals in the US have high rates of recidivism. (Around 80 to 90%) Whereas (in theory) an illegal alien convicted of a crime is removed from the population by deportation, hence lowering the level of criminals among that population. This would tend to skew incarceration figures as a percent of the population lower.
He cynically compared the incarceration rate of Black Americans (which are incarcerated at a rate 6 times higher than Whites and 24 times higher than Asians..) to mask the higher than average incarceration rate of illegal aliens. Part of the reason that Blacks are incarcerated at such a high rate is due to ridiculous drug laws in recent years and lack of job opportunities due to a large unskilled labor force clearly preferred by employers, that being the aforementioned illegal aliens. In the 1920s at a time when the nation was clearly much more racist (with KKK members openly sitting in congress..) Blacks had an incarceration only 2.5 times higher than Whites. |
