Math Is Amazing: Virtually None of the Migrants Seeking Asylum Are Violent Criminals

If you're incredibly unlucky like me and think that you need this kind of shit to stay abreast of the fuckery of the administration of Donald Trump, you will get daily briefings from the White House that are propaganda missives so clumsy and contrived that Goebbels is rolling his eyes in Hell (of course, the eyes are across the room from his head because, well, it's Hell). For instance, today's spam of the damned has links to a "column" from conservative toilet, Townhall (motto: "We're batshit fascists and barely human racists and loving it!")  and the right-wing rag that gives actual rags a bad name, the Washington Examiner.

It's also got a link to a Fox "news" article, "Hundreds of migrant caravan members found to have US criminal histories." The email highlighted this passage:

Now, by my awesome ability to use a calculator, 660 criminals out of 8000 people is about 8%. But most of those "criminal convictions" are obviously not violent crimes because the next numbers talk about those. So 43 out 8000 is roughly one half of one percent. For that, the administration is running around with its hair on fire about the rapists and murderers getting into the country.

The article itself goes into more numbers, including a caravan from Honduras that has 3300 migrants. According to DHS, the total violent criminals is 53, including sexual offenses, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted murder. Again, using the magic of my calculator, that's 1.6% of the migrants. I'd bet there's a higher proportion of violent people in any office building.

By the way, drug offenses aside, there is no blanket prohibition on people with criminal convictions coming to the United States. It's a case-by-case thing.

Nearly half of crimes these criminals were convicted of were being in the United States illegally and traffic offenses, with another good amount being low-level drug offenses, like possession. And according to Customs and Border Patrol's own numbers, just 4.4% of the total number of migrants who came to the country in 2018 had criminal convictions. Almost none, statistically, were for violent crime, and we know who the violent criminals are because of the vetting process for asylum claims (and, sure, some probably slip through the cracks because that's how bureaucracy works).

This means that 95.6% of the migrants had no criminal record, despite the Trump administration's constant refrain that we are under some kind of existential threat. Yes, there is a humanitarian disaster at the border, but it's got to do with the criminal actions of our federal government and not the supposed criminality of the migrants.

Bear that in mind this weekend when ICE agents show up at churches to arrest families and deport them.