Is Donald Trump Right About Crimes Committed by Illegal Aliens?

Republicans are now foundering on the rocky shoals of Donald Trump’s rhetoric. Three weeks after Trump set the media world aflame with his comments about illegal immigration, the debate has not quelled.

Democrats and the media, seeking a way to demonize Republicans with Hispanic voters, have turned Trump’s statements into a litmus test for other Republican candidates. Do they agree with Trump, or do they disagree?...

Naturally, the Republican elites are appalled at Trump’s commentary and manner... But instead of separating the message from the messenger, they have bought wholesale into the media narrative: Trump is a racist, and any discussion of illegal immigrant criminality betrays a deeper xenophobia...

Nobody would have heard of 32-year-old Kate Steinle, murdered over the weekend in San Francisco by a five-times-deported illegal [alien] immigrant seeking sanctuary in the city; nobody would have heard of the six-times-deported illegal immigrant charged in a felony hit-and-run of an Arizona mom and her two young kids; nobody would have heard of the four-times-deported illegal immigrant in Texas who confessed to hammering his wife to death.

The media have come to the defense of illegal immigrants, suggesting that illegal immigrants have a lower rate of crime than the general population. This neglects the basic fact that America’s immigration policy should be selective enough to avoid criminals altogether, rather than letting in swaths of illegal immigrants via an unprotected southern border. But is that contention even true?...

The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-illegal immigration group, cites criminal statistics from certain counties, like Maricopa County, Arizona, where 22 percent of felons are illegal immigrants; they point out that as of 2009, “57 percent of the 76 fugitive murderers most wanted by the FBI were foreign-born”; they rip the “poor quality of data used” in the PPIC and IPC studies, with good reason.

Why this controversy? Shouldn’t it be easy to determine the criminality rate of illegal immigrants by, for example, determining the place of origin for those currently in America’s prisons? It would be, but as Ann Coulter has pointed out, the government refuses to measure such statistics...

Underreporting crime does not mean that crime does not exist. It simply means it is ignored...