the right wing’s favorite anti-immigrant claims is that immigrants are dangerous and commit high levels of crime. A new report by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, however, finds that these claims are baseless:

 Quote:
“In California, as in the rest of the nation, immigrants … have extremely low rates of criminal activity,” said Kristin Butcher, a co-author of the report, “Crime, Corrections and California: What Does Immigration Have to Do With It?”

Available data, the report’s authors said, “suggest that long-standing fears of immigration as a threat to public safety are unjustified.”

Starting with the fact that immigrants make up 35 percent of the state’s adult population but only 17 percent of its prisoners, researchers said they discovered several “striking” findings.


And since Wonder Boy likes making his unfounded assertions because he read it in a book by Pat Buchanan. In his books and in numerous media appearances, Pat Buchanan has been trying to make the case that Mexican immigrants are fundamentally unlike past immigrant groups. Buchanan, who is of Irish ancestry, argues that Germans, Irish, Italians, etc were different because they were willing and able to assimilate. On Hannity and Colmes he stated, “[T]he guys I went to school with in the ’50s and ’60s and the ’40s, they were the sons of immigrants. They’d all been completely assimilated, Americanized. We were marinated in the same culture.”

But Buchanan’s statements against Hispanic immigrants mirror the charges that German, Irish, Italian, Jews, and other immigrant groups also faced. Some examples:

Immigrants will not be able to assimilate:

 Quote:
Where the Italians wanted to be part of our family, millions of Mexicans are determined to retain their language and loyalty to Mexico. They prefer to remain outsiders. They do not wish to assimilate and the nation no longer demands that they do so. [Buchanan, p. 28, 2006]


VERSUS

 Quote:
Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Languages or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion. [Benjamin Franklin, 1751]


Immigrants are responsible for crime:

 Quote:
Many Hispanics, as a matter of fact, you know what culture they are assimilating to? — the rap culture, the crime culture, anti-cops, all the rest of it. [Buchanan, 8/22/06]


VERSUS

 Quote:
“The Irish fill our prisons, our poor houses. … Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic. Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country.” [Chicago Post, 1868]


Immigrants plan to commit treason against America:

 Quote:
Mexican-Americans can now become citizens of Mexico again. The whole idea is to create this giant fifth column in the United States which can leverage the American government in elections and pressure them to do what is in the interest of the nation of Mexico. [Buchanan, 8/22/06]


VERSUS

 Quote:
[A] set of citizens, German and Irish, wanted to get the Constitution of the U. S. into their own hands and sell it to a foreign power. [Theme of an American Nativist Party rally, 1844]


Immigrants come from inferior cultures:

 Quote:
[A]lmost all immigrants today, legal and illegal, come from countries and cultures whose peoples have never before been assimilated into a First World nation. [Buchanan, p. 221, 2006]


VERSUS

 Quote:
Today, instead of a nation descended from generations of freemen bred to a knowledge of principles and practice of self government, of liberty under the law, we have a heterogeneous population, no small proportion of which is sprung from races that throughout the centuries have known no liberty at all… In other words our capacity to maintain our cherished institutions stands diluted by a stream of alien blood, with all of its misconceptions respecting the relationships of the governing power to the governed. [Rep. Albert Johnson, 1927, justifying the 1924 National Origins Act]


Immigrants will dilute the white race:

 Quote:
If we do not get control of our borders, by 2050 Americans of European descent will be a minority in the nation their ancestors created and built. No nation has ever undergone so radical a demographic transformation and survived. [Buchanan, p. 11, 2006]


VERSUS

 Quote:
The number of purely white People in the World is proportionally very small…in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are Germans also, the Saxons only accepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. [Benjamin Franklin, 1751]


Similarly, during Senate debate on immigration Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) warned against allowing too many immigrants into the country. He stated that
 Quote:
“the numbers cannot be too great or it takes jobs from Americans and can, in fact, create cultural problems that wouldn’t occur if it was a little slower.”


Conservative columnist Bob Novak responds:

 Quote:
That recalls the 1911 report of the U.S. Immigration Commission asserting that the “proportion of the more serious crimes of homicide, blackmail and robbery . . . is greater among the foreign born,” who also refuse to learn the English language.

In reading part of that report into the Senate record, Graham declared that these immigrants who were “ruining America” fathered the “greatest generation.” That immigrant wave included my grandfather, a Russian Imperial army veteran working on the John Deere tractor assembly line in Moline, Ill., as an unskilled, undocumented alien who could not speak English. He was an American patriot proud of a son who fought with the U.S. infantry through Africa and Italy in World War II.


We're a nation of immigrants. legal and illegal, conservative and liberal, Republican and Democratic. but what does it matter, as in the past, Wonder Boy will simply ignore these nonpartisan studies and go right back to his bigoted innacurate statements from his Pat Buchana books without missing a beat.