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Fox News is determined to make every one of their viewers despise immigrants, illegal or otherwise, by every corrupt means possible.

Fox & Friends displayed an on-screen graphic promoting a ridiculous Family Security Matters estimate that “2,158 killed by illegals every year.” But that statistic is derived from completely baseless assumptions about immigrants’ crime rates. Actual studies have found that immigrants in general are less likely to be incarcerated and that there is no evidence that undocumented immigrants commit a disproportionate amount of crime.

The number ’2158′ comes from a 2005 cooked up analysis by a nutcase named Mac Johnson.  Here’s how it came about.

After admitting that “the murder rate among illegal aliens in America is unknown,” Johnson assumed that the rate at which “illegal aliens” murder would remain consistent with murder rates from the immigrant’s home country. From his 2005 Human Events article:

I assumed that 3,871,912 Mexicans in America kill at the same rate as 3,871,912 Mexicans in Mexico, then did the same for 336,717 Salvadorans, 77,000 Brazilians, 226,886 Chinese and 39 other categories of illegal alien — as totaled in a Census Bureau estimate of the illegal alien population in 2000. The report’s total figure was that 8.7 million illegal aliens are in our country.

[...]

Using the above method, I estimated that illegal aliens kill 1,480 people in America every year. This assumes that the 8.7 million illegal aliens in America have a population age structure and a sex ratio similar to that of their homelands.  Most murders are committed by young males.  If the illegal population in America is skewed toward young males, as most believe, the murder total is actually much higher.  Comparing the age structure of the population of illegal aliens that applied for amnesty during the Reagan administration…

What a pile of crap!  And Fox has no problem interviewing some guy who throws around this number as if its scientific fact.  Now every intellectually challenged jackass who has made Fox their source for news has one more item to support their bigoted views.  And of course, the number will be used on right-wing blogs and be cited by every crackpot conservative talk show across the country.  Let’s see how soon some Republican congressman uses the number to justify Arizona’s racist immigration law.

If illegal immigrant’s home country murder rate is a fair indicator then it should equally apply to legal immigrants.  Applying the logic used by Johnson, all immigration should be halted immediately.  The borders should be closed and a giant plexiglass dome built over the entire country.

A solid argument could be made (and should be made) for controlling illegal immigration.  But it should not be done using contorted numbers which have no basis in fact.

I don’t know.  With the degree of idiocy out there, on some days it all seems so freaking hopeless.

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