Illegals and crime

Thank goodness for the Sutherland Institute. If you’re unfamiliar with this Utah think-tank, it is about as conservative as they come — but its opinions are based on facts, not popular opinion.
Which is why the institute’s work on illegal immigration is so important.
Sutherland just released two new papers on illegal immigration in Utah. (Find them here. In the first, researchers actually looked at how many inmates in Utah’s county jails are undocumented.
The results will surprise the anti-immigration crowd, if they actually care about facts. In 17 jails that provided data, only 3.9 percent of their inmates were illegal.
That’s funny. The mantra we keep hearing from the blowhards is that illegals all come across the border to commit crime. The highest percentage was in Utah County, but even there it was only 13.1 percent.
And the state prison? Less than 5 percent of inmates there are undocumented. This despite a skyrocketing increase in illegal immigrants in Utah (a 57 percent jump from 2004-2008).
In a few days, SB81 Will take effect in Utah. In the second paper, Sutherland shows how this draconian law will actually make Utahns less safe as law enforcement is forced to spend much more time and resources chasing after a problem that doesn’t exist.
Meanwhile, employers will receive no training in how to use a mandatory E-verify program that has been proven to make mistakes.
Sutherland says most people don’t consider themselves criminals if they speed or break trespassing laws. “Many reasonable Utahns consider illegal immigration in like manner. Undocumented immigration, like other minor offenses, does not destroy civil society. To put in another way, it is not the number of illegal-border crossers in an area that paralyzes a community with fear, but rather the number of rapists, murderers and violent gang members (i.e., the number of real criminals.)”
And those are not likely to be illegal immigrants.
As I see it, the folks who passed SB 81 were either racist or extremely sloppy — passing a law without bothering to verify the hysterical claims of a loud minority.
Real conservatives don’t act that way. As Sutherland suggests, the law should be changed or repealed all together.