Louis Gohmert's Illegal Alien Crime Statistics Are a Ruse

I've said this before and I'll say it again:

Humans commit crimes. Humans break laws. Just because a criminal happens to be an "illegal alien" does not make that crime more alarming.

Enter Louis Gohmert, the ever fear mongering Congressman from the great state of Texas. This gentleman has been on the rampage against the recent influx of illegal border crossers, the majority of which are children.

According the Right Wing Watch's captured audio,  Gohmert said the following:

...in fact, of the 171,000 [illegals] who had committed a crime [within the last 5 years], there were uh 671,000 crimes committed..separate crimes committed, by those 171,000 people.

Now, at face value, this is an astonishing number. But, when you really begin to drill down into the actual details of the rhetoric, you begin to see a much different picture than the excitable Gohmert wants you to see.

First of all, when a crime is committed, that crime carries with it a number of charges. A neighbor of mine was recently arrested for breaking a "no contact" order, and was slapped with half a dozen charges at his initial hearing. The problem here is that these were not distinct crimes, insomuch that he had committed six separate acts of crime. Instead, they were six different charges for the exact same action - breaking the "no contact" order. To pretend that 671,000 crimes committed by 171,000 individuals is a bad number, is to purposefully inflate the idea, depending on your audiences ignorance.

Also, if we use the crime numbers from the last five years, in Texas (2008 - 2012), something interesting begins to take shape. In this equation we will be adding up the following crimes (which are not even remotely the same as the crimes listed in Gohmert's 671,000 number. With knowledge of how Louis works, that number includes crimes like jay-walking, etc.):

• Violent crimes
• Property crimes
• Murder
• Rape (Texas calls it "forcible rape", but I'll skip that label, being that I find it redundant)
• Robbery
• Aggravated assault
• Burglary
• Larceny/Theft
• Vehicle theft

Now, these numbers include ALL crimes by ALL inhabitants of Texas, not just illegals. It comes to 5,254,828 crimes. If you compare that to the 671,000 crimes, even assuming that all of those crimes are in the above list (though they are most likely not), you will notice that the crimes committed by illegals was about 12.7% of the total.

This means that non-illegals committed a whopping 87.3% of all listed crimes in the state of Texas in the last five years.

Also, Governor Perry has been talking about how this influx of illegals began in the year 2012 or earlier. If you look at crime statistics in Texas, you will notice that they are dropping. In sheer numbers, they are dropping. But, then, Texas is one of the fastest growing states in the union, by population, which dramatically increases the rate of the drop in crime statistics.

Couple all this with known facts that the American magnet lost it's pull during the Great Recession, causing illegal border crossing to drop off sharply after 2008, only recently increasing in numbers, due to an improving economy here and reported violence in Central America, and you begin to diverge from Gohmert's clean narrative.

Humans commit crimes. Illegal aliens (migrants) do not have a greater propensity to commit crimes, just by the mere fact that they are here illegally. In fact, if we were to decide which area of the population to deport based on crime statistics, we should probably shine a greater light on the non-illegal inhabitants of Texas, being they commit the vast majority of the criminal acts.