Yet another reader sent me a great bad math link. (Keep 'em coming guys!) This one is an astonishingly nasty slight of hand, and a great example of how people misuse statistics to support a political agenda. It's by someone named "Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin", and it's an attempt to paint illegal immigrants as a bunch of filthy criminal lowlifes. It's titled "The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States." With a title like that, you'd think that she has actual data showing that nearly one million sex crimes were committed by illegal immigrants, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be wrong.
After conducting a 12 month in-depth study of illegal immigrants who committed sex crimes and murders for the time period of January 1999 through April 2006 , it is clear that the U.S. public faces a dangerous threat from sex predators who cross the U.S. borders illegally.
There were 1500 cases analyzed in depth. They included: serial rapes, serial murders, sexual homicides, and child molestation committed by illegal immigrants. Police reports, public records, interviews with police, and media accounts were all included. Offenders were located in 36 states, but it is clear, that the most of the offenders were located in states with the highest numbers of illegal immigrants. California was number one, followed by Texas, Arizona, New Jersey, New York, and Florida.
Based on population numbers of 12,000,000 illegal immigrants and the fact that young males make up more of this population than the general U.S. population, sex offenders in the illegal immigrant group make up a higher percentage. When examining ICE reports and public records, it is consistent to find sex offenders comprising 2% of illegals apprehended. Based on this 2% figure, which is conservative, there are approximately 240,000 illegal immigrant sex offenders in the United States.
This translates to 93 sex offenders and 12 serial sexual offenders coming across U.S. borders illegally per day. The 1500 offenders in this study had a total of 5,999 victims. Each sex offender averaged 4 victims. This places the estimate for victimization numbers around 960,000 for the 88 months examined in this study.
That's the meat of the paper - the rest is essentially a list of statistics about the 1500 crimes she actually studied.
So her argument is:
Of the illegal immigrants arrested for a crime, 2% were sex offenders.
The total numbers of illegal immigrants is approximately 12 million.
Therefore, you can determine the number of sex offenders in the entire population of illegal immigrants by multiplying the size of the population (12 million) by 2%, giving you 960,000.
If you actually pay attention to the numbers and how she's trying to slip them past you, it's pretty obvious what kind of scam she's pulling, but she tries to mask it behind a lot of talk about kinds of sex crimes, and why we should expect the number to be high among illegal immigrants.
Here's the trick. 2% of the convicted criminals who happen to be illegal immigrants are guilty of some kind of sex crime. Not 2% of the population of illegal immigrants. The population of convicted criminals is quite different from the population of people as a whole.
To give you an idea: according to this article by the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, in 2001, approximately 5% of the population of people in state prisons were guilty of sex offenses. The estimate of the number of people in the general population guilty of sex crimes varies - but it's generally cited as somewhere between 1/3 of 1%, and 1%.
Now - the number of people in prison is different from the number of people arrested - so those two numbers are not directly comparable. But it should give you an idea of how different statistics about people convicted of crimes can be different from the statistics about the public in general.
So, looking at real statistics, the percentage of illegals guilty of sexual crimes is probably not particularly different from the percentage of non-illegals guilty of sexual crimes. And neither percentage says much of anything about the number of guilty individuals in the population as a whole.
In summary, Dr. Schurman-Kauflin is nothing but another two-bit racist who's trying to trick people using bad math.
These is yet another part to this, and it has to do with racial profiling, WHICH IS ILLEGAL WITHIN THE UNITED STATES. Therefore, it would be impossible for anyone to collect any meaningful data such as is claimed to have been done in the cited study.