Iowa Republican Congressman Steve King is at it again. In July, the racist, xenophobic Congressman proclaimed that for every dreamer who was a High School Valedictorian ”there’s another 100 out there who weigh 130 pounds and they’ve got calves the size of cantaloupes because they’re hauling 75 pounds of marijuana across the desert.” Although the statement was widely criticized, King never backed down from his unsubstantiated and inflammatory remarks. Fast forward from July to Friday, September 20th and King is once again spewing forth misleading and inflammatory statements regarding undocumented immigrants. At a Friday rally in Omaha, Nebraska King remarked that a former immigration official once told him the number of Americans killed by illegal immigrants is “in multiples of the victims of Sept. 11.” He continued by saying “now that hits home, doesn’t it? … Three thousand times something.”
Of course, as is typical of Steve King’s bombastic rhetoric, there is no data to back his claim merely an anecdote from an unverified source. Given that the United States averages 15,000 homicides a year and that September 11, 2001 was twelve years ago, it is possible that undocumented immigrants who make up around four percent of the US population could have committed 6000 or more homicides, since four percent of 180,000 (the approximate number of homicides in the US since September 11th, 2001) is 7200 or in King’s terms 3000 times something. However, this only underscores the misleading nature of King’s statement since he could have just as easily said American born citizens have killed fellow Americans in multiples of the September 11th attacks and do so every single year. This of course would be needlessly inflammatory but it is also a statement that, unlike his anti-immigrant remarks, is easy to verify and undeniably true.
The problem with King’s remarks is that they intentionally try to gin up irrational fear towards undocumented aliens and by extension legal immigrants and citizens of Hispanic origin. King’s goal is to frighten White Americans, especially those in his rural Iowa district, into believing that Latino immigrants are uniquely dangerous and that unless we seal our borders we will be murdered in our sleep by these evil menacing people who sneak across our border to rape, murder and plunder. However, the reality is that undocumented immigrants are not more likely to commit violent crimes. In fact, evidence suggests that they are less prone to criminal behavior than their “born in America” counterparts.
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A study conducted by University of California-Irvine sociologist Ruben Rumbaut and Immigration Policy Center Research Associate Walter Ewing, found that foreign born men age 18-39 were considerably less likely to be incarcerated for crimes that men of the same age born in the United States. Foreign-born Mexican men, the primary target of Steve King’s racist rage, were two and a half times less likely to be jailed for a crime than white American-born men of the same age. So while King likes to drum up fear of imaginary hordes of marauding Mexican illegals coming to America to kill, they are 2.5 times less likely to commit criminal acts than men who were born in the United States that look like Steve King, that is, other native born white guys.
In fact, as the number of undocumented immigrants has increased, the violent crime rate in the United States has decreased. Violent crime has dropped to its lowest rate in this country since 1963. The homicide rate in the US peaked in the early 1990s. Since then the number of undocumented immigrants has tripled and the foreign born population has risen from under 8 percent to 13 percent of the total US population, yet the crime rate has dropped precipitously. Furthermore, some of the cities posting the most dramatic decreases in homicide are those with large influxes of foreign born immigrants, including New York City, Los Angeles, Dallas and Houston. Despite public perceptions that American border towns are war zones, the border towns of El Paso and San Diego are two of the safest large cities in the nation, with homicide and violent crime rates that are well below the national average. While it is hard to obtain precise numbers on how many homicides are committed annually by undocumented immigrants, the statistical evidence strongly suggests that they are far less dangerous than Steve King would have you believe. Come to think of it, they are far less dangerous than Steve King himself, whose vicious racism and xenophobia is a far greater threat to our nation’s safety and security than are the immigrants he is so fond of attacking.
Keith Brekhus is a progressive American who currently resides in Red Lodge, Montana. He is co-host for the Liberal Fix radio show. He holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology from the University of Missouri. In 2002, he ran for Congress as a Green Party candidate in the state of Missouri. In 2014, he worked as a field organizer for Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick’s successful re-election bid in Arizona’s 1st Congressional District. He can be followed on Twitter @keithbrekhus or on Facebook.
