Alexander Cockburn | The Bogus Crime Wave


Lou Dobbs is pondering a political run powered by a thousand pop-eyed commentaries catering to this fear. “A third of the prison population in this country is estimated to be illegal aliens,” he shouts. Glenn Beck screams about “an illegal alien crime wave.”

The panic is by no means confined to the nutball right. Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia, launching his commendable plan for a National Criminal Justice Commission last year, invoked the specter of organized Mexican gangs that supposedly threaten “hundreds” of American cities. “There are an estimated 1 million gang members in the United States, many of them foreign-based,” Webb wrote. “Every American neighborhood is vulnerable. Gangs commit 80 percent of the crime in some locations. Mexican cartels, which are military-capable, have operations in 230-plus U.S. cities.”

It’s all nonsense. There’s no crime wave swollen by brown gangbangers to city-destroying proportions. If you want a lucid walk through the data, you can turn to … The American Conservative, whose March issue features a cover story by the magazine’s publisher, Ron Unz. There’s a photo of a tattooed gangbanger, and the title, “HisPANIC,” then the subtitle, “The Myth of Immigrant Crime.”

Yes, this is the magazine co-founded by Pat Buchanan, whose physical form I last clapped eyes on at the Republican convention in the Houston Astrodome in 1992, roaring to a climactic fist-shake against the black and brown hordes who had recently rioted in Los Angeles: “We must take back our cities, and take back our culture, and take back our country!”



Unz’s bottom line: “Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.” Since poverty and crime have an intimate connection, and since America’s Hispanics are advancing economically, the Hispanic crime rate will most likely drop more. An important further point: Unz uses Census figures for all the states, with a total estimate in 2008 of around 45 million Hispanics. But there’s a widespread view that illegal immigrants are significantly undercounted. So if there are, as some “brown tide” scaremongers allege, 25 million unreported Hispanic illegals above Census numbers, then the true Hispanic crime rate is 35 percent lower than Unz estimates. Almost beyond the shadow of a doubt, white crime rates nationwide are significantly higher than Hispanic ones. Sen. Webb needs to refocus his Threat Assessment.


Unz had a question for me: “Pro-immigrant advocacy organizations spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year in this exact subject area. So if my theories were correct or even just remotely plausible, wouldn’t such a vast army of paid researchers have long since discovered the same evidence and blasted it out to the four corners of the earth via a very supportive mainstream media?”



Copyright 2010