Donald Trump has experienced all sorts of blowback because of his remarks about illegal immigration. He doesn’t seem overly concerned. Regardless of how you feel about him as a presidential candidate, he has definitely made the debate interesting. So what is actually true about America’s problem with illegal immigration?
A website called Family Security Matters posted an article today detailing some of the numbers.
The article reports:
Non-Americans commit over five times more serious crimes per capita than Americans.
It is estimated that there are some 133,741 foreign criminals in prisons and jails in the USA (1). They are not there for spitting on the sidewalk or jaywalking, and very few are there for immigration violations, as those illegal alien criminals are typically deported in fairly short order or simply let go as we have seen time and time again. They are there in large part for molesting, raping, killing, maiming and murdering people in America, as you will see below.
Add in the 168,680 convicted criminal immigrants who have final orders of removal but who remain at large in the U.S., and another 179,018 convicted criminal aliens with deportation cases pending but who are also at large (2), and we have a total non-American felon population of 481,439…a number the size of our 35th largest city, Sacramento, California, and larger than the entire populations each of Atlanta, Kansas City, Omaha, Miami, Minneapolis – and more.
And remember, for most of these felons, there was a victim.
This is not encouraging. The article goes on to point out that although illegal aliens comprise less than 5 percent of the population, they make up 27 percent of the prison population.
So what has happened to American immigration? Has it changed over the years? Are we allowing legal immigration of people who are going to have a harder time assimilating than in the past? Yes to all three questions.
Senator Ted Kennedy was responsible for getting the 1965 Immigration Act (the Hart-Celler Act) passed. That Act represented a drastic change in American immigration policies. Previous immigration policies had favored immigrants from England, Ireland, and Germany–people from countries that had originally populated America. This Act added policies calling for “family reunification.” Numerical restrictions on visas were set at 170,000 per year, with a per-country-of-origin quota, not including immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or “special immigrants” (including those born in “independent” nations in the Western Hemisphere, former citizens, ministers, and employees of the U.S. government abroad). The new laws changed to demographic of America, resulting in pockets of various nationalities that did not assimilate. America was no longer a ‘melting pot,’ it had become a country of groups that were not necessarily interested in assimilating.
This is not a recipe for a successful country. America was built by people who came here for a better life and to become Americans. Many immigrants still fit that description, but many do not. Legal and illegal immigrants have learned how to take advantage of America’s welfare benefits and its tax system. In March of this year, I wrote an article about the use of the Earned Income Tax Credit and Child Credit by illegal aliens. This is directly taking money away from working Americans and giving it to people who are here illegally. That needs to stop.
At any rate, Donald Trump is pointing out things Americans need to be aware of. Again, regardless of how you plan to vote in the 2016 election, it is probably a good idea to listen to what he is saying. The one advantage Donald Trump has over most of the other candidates is that he is beholden to no one for money. Unfortunately many of our politicians cannot make that claim.