Thursday, May 20, 2010

Crime Is Down, Deportation Is At Record Highs - What's The Real Problem?

I'm sure everyone has heard the claims from the right supporting their controversial immigration bill in Arizona, but has anybody looked at the facts?  All I get from the right-wing media are a bunch of vague nothings and assumptions, references to experiences from unnamed sources, and just misrepresented figures.  I was told by one commenter on Big Government that 15% of the prison population in Arizona consists of illegal immigrants - a higher percentage then the actual immigrant population, and that is supposed to be enough evidence that immigrants are wreaking havoc on the southwest.

ABC News has done some fact checking to all these accusations charecterized by Governer Jan Brewer as "murder, terror and mayhem," and the numbers don't really support the conservative's claims, which leaves the question - What is the underlying issue?

According to ABC News, crime is down, immigration is down, deportations are up, and the number of border patrol agents are up.  Here are the figures:
More than 646 miles of the border are protected by fence, according to Customs and Border Protection.

More than 20,000 border patrol agents serve on the front lines -- an 80 percent increase over 2004 and the largest number in history.

The number of illegal immigrants apprehended along the border, which CBP uses to gauge the flow of migrants, is down nearly 55 percent from 2005. The agency captured 540,865 last year.

Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained and deported a record 387,790 unauthorized immigrants across the U.S. in 2009, and is on pace to set a new record in 2010.

And the growing number of deportations comes as the overall size of the U.S. illegall immigrant population -- 62 percent of which hails from Mexico -- continues to decline. The U.S. unauthorized population in 2009 was 10.8 million, down from a peak of 11.8 million in 2007.
As I pointed out before, those who fall for the crap passed off as news on propaganda sites like Andrew Breitbart's bevy of Big domains, they claim to know the numbers, but in reality they have no comprehension, otherwise they would have realized that there is no way to say with certainty how many illegal immigrants there are in the nation, but the facts regarding apprehensions along the border coupled with deportations point to a positive trend, and that should make conservatives very happy.

IT seems that most conservatives aren't getting their news from the news, but rather, they are receiving sensationalized stories that are further blown out of proportion - the flow of information starts off terribly skewed, and trickles down like a game of telephone.  Those opinions are then fed back into the system, and the result is legislation like the one in Arizona.

What is interesting is the claims that President Obama has been sleeping on the job when it comes to immigration, but when the numbers show that immigration is down from the last administration, and continuing to decline, one can easily come to the conclusion that Obama is doing quite well.  Conservatives are just trying to keep an edge by manufacturing a crisis.

And the conservatives say there is a liberal bias in the media.

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