VERIFIABLE DECEPTION USED TO ATTACK DONALD TRUMP ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRANT CRIME RATES
by
BRANDON DARBY12 Jul 2015
194
Arguments ripe with deception, trickery, and data manipulation are being presented to attack Donald Trump’s assertions on illegal immigrants who come from Mexico. The vast majority of media coverage chose to claim that Trump had made comments on all immigrants from Mexico. Trump’s detractors then used statistics on all immigrants in the U.S. from the entire world to attack and discredit Trump’s assertions.
The recent
Anderson Cooper interview with Trump began well, as Cooper used the term “illegal immigrants” to describe Trump’s comments and to set the parameters on the interview discussion. Though Cooper started the segment using the term “illegal immigration,” he quickly relied on a Pew Research Center study on “immigrants” and crime levels, not “illegal immigrants.” Trump missed the sly change, and the apples-to-apples debate morphed into an apples-to-oranges debate with one side unaware of the subtle, but significant, switch.
Cooper appears to have based his argument off of a recent Salon article published a day prior to the aforementioned interview. The Salon article, “This proves Donald Trump is lying: Here are the actual facts on immigrants and crime,”
also engaged in the deceptive sleight of hand to their readers. Their first sentence asserted, “Donald Trump opened his 2016 presidential campaign with an epic rant against Mexican immigrants.” A few sentences later and Salon doubled down on their dishonest assertion: “He went on to tell CNN that the threat lies not just with Mexican immigrants, but with immigrants in general.”
Salon then tripled down:
Here is what you need to know: immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than people born in the United States. A 2013 Pew Research Center study found that across all people aged 12 to 24 (the teen and young adult years when almost all criminal activity first begins) immigrants were much less likely than the U.S.-born to have committed a crime in the last year.
By intentionally using the term “immigrant,” Trump’s detractors battle a strawman. They cite studies focused on
all immigrants, not just
illegal aliens who enter the U.S. secretly and illegally. They mix statistics from legal immigrants with the far-fewer number of illegal aliens in the United States, causing the crime numbers to look better for illegal aliens.
Perhaps the
argument against Trump that used the most trickery appeared in the Washington Post. Their July 2 article, “Surprise! Donald Trump is wrong about immigrants and crime,” also referred to Trumps comments against illegal immigration as remarks against “immigration.”
The Washington Post wrote:
Since undocumented immigrants are
more than a quarter of the immigrant population, it’s nearly impossible that the overall-immigrant crime rate could be so much lower if the undocumented-immigrant crime rate were significantly higher.
Again: Trump specifically talked about illegal aliens, not all immigrants (the
Post’s attempt at mathematical prowess and conjecture will be debunked throughout the remainder of this article). The
Post insisted on focusing the discussion on
all immigrants, even though Trump clearly spoke about
illegal aliens from Mexico and clarified himself multiple times on this point. Still, the
Post asserted:
On CNN on Wednesday night, he offered a defense to anchor Don Lemon.
“If you look at the statistics, of people coming … I didn’t say about Mexico, I say the illegal immigrants —if you look at the statistics on rape, on crime, on everything, coming in illegally to the country, they’re mind-boggling,” he told Lemon.
Every part of that is incorrect. He did say his comments about Mexico — explicitly. And data show that new immigrants — including illegal immigrants — are actually less likely to commit crime, not more.
To wit:
—”Foreign-born individuals exhibit remarkably low levels of involvement in crime across their life course.” (Bianca Bersani, University of Massachusetts, 2014. Published in
Justice Quarterly.)
Citing Bersani’s work, Pew Research
created this graph, showing crime rates among the immigrant community.
Notice it didn’t matter what Trump said. They acknowledge his clarification and then insist on continuing to keep the conversation on
all immigrants. They imply to their readers that they focus on data about
all immigrants in the U.S. from Mexico, but then shift to using data that focuses
on all immigrants in the U.S. from the entire world to attack Trump. In addition to these issues with the
Post article, the paper failed to inform its readers that the actual study cited first appeared in 2012 and was based largely off of information gathered in previous decades.