January 10, 2007

Comment Thread for The 100 Man Lurch

Hatched by Dafydd

Comments, carps, complaints, cavils, and chit-chat about my Michelle Malkin post The 100 Man Lurch.

Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards; it makes them soggy and hard to light. If you value your hat and coat -- wear 'em.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 10, 2007, at the time of 2:57 AM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this hissing: http://biglizards.net/mt3.36/earendiltrack.cgi/1659

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Comment Thread for The 100 Man Lurch:

» Big Lizards: The 100 Man Lurch from Michelle Malkin
This post is by Dafydd of Big Lizards, not by our dearest Michelle. No, seriously... I really mean it. I don't look anything like her, and I'm married to a lady, not a dude. And I think I'm taller than... [Read More]

Tracked on January 16, 2007 9:19 PM

Comments

The following hissed in response by: Capitalist Infidel

Dude

You basically said the same thing SeeDub did. You both concluded that the sample size was too small.

The above hissed in response by: Capitalist Infidel [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 4:05 AM

The following hissed in response by: Mark J

No he didn't. See-Dubya was conflating recidivism of illegal immigrants with inherent criminality among immigrants. The normal recidivism rate in the US is at least 60%. What does that say about me (never been arrested or charged with a crime)? Nothing. What does a 73% recidivism rate among illegal immigrants say about illegal immigrants? Nothing.

Now as for our ability to "correct" criminals, those numbers say a lot. But they say nothing about the criminality of people who have never been arrested.

The above hissed in response by: Mark J [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 4:40 AM

The following hissed in response by: reggiethorn

Representative sample or not (of course, not) the relevant comment I take away from CW's angle is that "they only come here to work and do jobs Americans won't do" isn't just a load of crap. It's also an outright lie when said by those that are aware of the repeated arrests (i.e. Bloomberg, Arnold).

The above hissed in response by: reggiethorn [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 6:33 AM

The following hissed in response by: sfrvn

Actually, the criminal-criminals are a subset of the criminals. Therefore, they do influence the arrest and conviction statistics of the criminals. How big a subset and therefore how much they influence those statistics is the (my) question.

The above hissed in response by: sfrvn [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 6:51 AM

The following hissed in response by: LarryD

The nature of Mexican society has an effect:

Mexico is a notoriously low-trust culture and a notoriously unequal one. The great traveler Alexander von Humboldt observed two centuries ago, in words that are arguably still true, “Mexico is the country of inequality. Perhaps nowhere in the world is there a more horrendous distribution of wealth, civilization, cultivation of land, and population.” Jorge G. Castañeda, Vicente Fox’s first foreign minister, noted the ethnic substratum of Mexico’s disparities in 1995:

The business or intellectual elites of the nation tend to be white (there are still exceptions, but they are becoming more scarce with the years). By the 1980s, Mexico was once again a country of three nations: the criollo minority of elites and the upper-middle class, living in style and affluence; the huge, poor, mestizo majority; and the utterly destitute minority of what in colonial times was called the Republic of Indians…

Castañeda pointed out, “These divisions partly explain why Mexico is as violent and unruly, as surprising and unfathomable as it has always prided itself on being. The pervasiveness of the violence was obfuscated for years by the fact that much of it was generally directed by the state and the elites against society and the masses, not the other way around. The current rash of violence by society against the state and elites is simply a retargeting.”

These attitudes could take generations to change, especially as liberals are anti-assimilation, and the illegals hunker down and socially isolate themselves.

The above hissed in response by: LarryD [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 7:24 AM

The following hissed in response by: jay cee

The point of the whole story is not contained in the logic or logical fallacies of the article. The point is "Why do we, USA citizens, allow illegal aliens and illegal alien criminals to proliferate in our society? We have enough criminal and illegal activity with out the illegal aliens, criminal or not criminal. The cost and expense of keeping track of illegal aliens is an enourmous waste of resources. That's why we need a coherent
and self serving method of dealing with this problem. Enforcement of current law or revision of current law is the object of the article.

The above hissed in response by: jay cee [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 7:55 AM

The following hissed in response by: Bard

My thoughts (half-joking) are that anytime we find these criminals, we give them a parachute and air-drop them into Venezuela (eat me, Hugo Chavez).

Seriously though, these are the ones we should be sending to Joe Arpaio's Tent City. Let them enjoy the fun and frolic of desert-prison-tent life while while we work to pass a bill to build a wall along the southern border and using them as labor.

The above hissed in response by: Bard [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 8:21 AM

The following hissed in response by: white rabbit

Capitalist, maybe I'm being a bit too picky here, but they already ARE criminals by being here illegally. Getting caught breaking a different laws doesn't change that little fact.

There's just the difference between cimininal for being here and more "career" criminal for continuing to break more laws.

ttfn!

The above hissed in response by: white rabbit [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 9:09 AM

The following hissed in response by: John Tirman


Research has shown consistently that immigrants---legal or not---commit fewer crimes than citizens do. This fact, established over a long period of time in the U.S., should sober up the xenophobes a little. Refs: "Cross-City Evidence on the Relationship between Immigration and Crime," by Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl,
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management (1998); and "Sociological Criminology and the Mythology of Hispanic Immigration and Crime," by John Hagan and Alberto Palloni, Social Problems, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Nov., 1999), pp. 617-632. There are many more. See for truly brilliant banter, "Border Battles," http://borderbattles.ssrc.org/

It's never too late to learn......

The above hissed in response by: John Tirman [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 12:49 PM

The following hissed in response by: BigLeeH

Most of the debate over immigration in this country is as pointless as a drunk and a temperance lady debating the problem represented by a half-empty glass. They can both agree, in passing, that it is somewhere between full and empty, and further, that the glass represents a problem about which they both feel strongly -- but they will agree on nothing more. He sees only the void left by the cheapskate bartender and she sees only demon rum.

The above hissed in response by: BigLeeH [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 1:14 PM

The following hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh

Sfrvn:

Actually, the criminal-criminals are a subset of the criminals.

This is trivially true, in the sense that the set of "criminals" (which appears to be your term for illegal aliens) obviously contains the subset of "criminals" who are also "criminal-criminals."

By the same argument, since both Pope Benedict and Charles Manson are subsets of "human being," studying Manson tells us "something" about the Pope... but nothing at all useful, in a sociological sense.

What studying criminal-criminals can tell us about illegal aliens who are not "criminal criminals" is non-useful, because there is no evidence that the set of illegal aliens has the criminal mentality we find in the set of criminal-criminal... which is the main point we're trying to get at.

People for whom illegal immigration in and of itself is a horrific crime on a par with rape, robbery, and murder frequently make this mistake (I'm not saying you're one of these people, but you do appear to be making the same mistake; if I'm wrong, I apologize):

Criminal-criminals have a very definite, measurable, and life-determining mentality; it includes, e.g., a sense of entitlement, dislocation from society, inability to comprehend a future, an "oral fixation" (to use an old Freudian term that I'm not even sure is still used -- I'd have to ask my sister!), disdain for authority, and so forth. These people were criminals in their home countries before they ever came here.

But the typical illegal immigrant does not appear to be anything like that: he may be entering illegally because he is fleeing intolerable conditions in his home country -- yet our arbitrary, capricious, hodge-podge of immigration laws denies him a "green card" without cause or reason, while granting one to others who are no better qualified and sometimes much less.

Illegals who are not criminal-criminals would be about the same percentage as those native-born Americans who are not criminals (in the sense of a criminal mentality) forced through circumstances to commit a crime -- the classic example of the "lost, starving hiker who finds an unoccupied hunter's hut, breaks in and eats some food" situation: such people, though technically criminals, are no more likely (under normal conditions) to commit a serious crime than anyone else.

They break the law only because of extraordinary circumstances. Absent those extraordinary circumstances, they don't break the law; and they don't break other laws that the circumstances don't require... our starving hiker doesn't eat the food -- then, since he's doing all this crime anyway, go find some woman to rape.

(A similar example: people who break an evil law in a dictatorship -- hiding an escaped slave, for example -- are no more likely to engage in actual criminal-criminal behavior than anyone else.)

But a person who commits an armed robbery (not under extraordinary duress) is very likely to do so again and again and again, as well as commit burglary, rape, and to urinate on the sidewalk.

This is the essence of the "broken windows" theory of criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, which became the basis for Rudy Giuliani's crackdown on crime in New York City:

Criminals really are different from the rest of us; they have a pervasive criminal mentality that causes them to commit crimes both large and small... hence, you can often catch major criminals by arresting people for committing petty crime: people arrested in NYC for urinating in the streets often turned out to be wanted for bank robbery, kidnapping, or assault with a deadly weapon.

This stands in contradistinction to people who do not have a criminal mentality but are driven to commit a minor crime out of desperation: they have very low rates of recidivism.

For this reason, a study of criminal-criminals (who have that criminal mindset) tells us exactly nothing about the larger set of illegal aliens, because there is an essential component of criminality present in the study group but lacking from the vast majority of the larger universe.

Dafydd

The above hissed in response by: Dafydd ab Hugh [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 10, 2007 2:48 PM

The following hissed in response by: sfrvn

Dafydd ab Hugh;

      (I said) Actually, the criminal-criminals are a subset of the criminals.


    This is trivially true, in the sense that the set of "criminals" (which appears to be your term for illegal aliens) obviously contains the subset of "criminals" who are also "criminal-criminals."


    By the same argument, since both Pope Benedict and Charles Manson are subsets of "human being," studying Manson tells us "something" about the Pope... but nothing at all useful, in a sociological sense.


    What studying criminal-criminals can tell us about illegal aliens who are not "criminal criminals" is non-useful, because there is no evidence that the set of illegal aliens has the criminal mentality we find in the set of criminal-criminal... which is the main point we're trying to get at.

The term "criminal-criminals," which I borrowed, may be striking a nerve. We can change it to "illegal aliens who commit other crimes" if that helps. I would prefer not to use "undocumented aliens who commit other crimes." How about just "set" and "subset"?

But to the point I think you are trying to make, I think whether it is "trivial" or not is an issue of magnitude, both of the number of crimes and the severity of those crimes. If the "subset" is on the order of .0001% and the crimes are shoplifting, criminal mischief, etc. I would agree, it is probably trivial. If it is on the order of .001% but the crimes are major ones, e.g., murder, rape, sexual abuse of children, I don't think it is trivial. If the "set" is 12,000,000 then the "subset" is 12,000. That would be a lot of people to add to our already overflowing criminal justice system. That, in my mind, is not trivial and alone would justify enforcing our immigration laws.

I agree that studying Pope Benedict would not tell you anything about Charles Manson in a behavioral sense. But studying a subset of Popes would tell you something about Popes. Again, homw much it tells you comes back to sample size and how representative the sample is - how big the subset is relative to the set.

    People for whom illegal immigration in and of itself is a horrific crime on a par with rape, robbery, and murder frequently make this mistake (I'm not saying you're one of these people, but you do appear to be making the same mistake; if I'm wrong, I apologize)

No, I am not among those who think illegal immigration is a horrific crime on par with rape, etc., (are there really people who do?). I think the punishment for illegal immigration, deportation, is an appropriate. But one problem is, what is the appropriate punishment for a subset crime (when an illegal alien commits rape, for example)? I don't know. I don't think the punishment should be the same as for a citizen, do you?

Take Care,


The above hissed in response by: sfrvn [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 11, 2007 8:23 AM

Post a comment

Thanks for hissing in, . Now you can slither in with a comment, o wise. (sign out)

(If you haven't hissed a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Hang loose; don't shed your skin!)


Remember me unto the end of days?


© 2005-2009 by Dafydd ab Hugh - All Rights Reserved