WSJ Edit Page Whitewashes The Immigration Problem….Again

From VDare.com

Crime rates have declined in the last fifteen years. So have welfare rolls. Employment is at record levels. All this at a time when the illegal alien population has doubled, and maybe even quadrupled.

So illegal aliens are good for us. Right?

Well, that’s the implication of a recent Wall Street Journal editorial Keeping Book on Immigration. [December 31, 2007. Subscription required, or see here.]

We deconstruct this egregious piece of post hoc ergo propter hocmisinformation:

WSJ: "Between 1994 and 2005, the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. is estimated to have doubled to around 12 million. Yet according the Department of Justice, over that same period the violent crime rate in the U.S. declined by 34.2% and the property crime rate fell by 26.4%, reaching their lowest levels since 1973. Crime has fallen in cities with the largest immigrant populations—such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami—as well as border cities like San Diego and El Paso, Texas."

VDARE.com: Illegal aliens are on the rise, but so are mortgage defaults, obese children, and sunspot activity. Does anyone attribute lower crime rates to those things?

Immigrant gateway cities are places where Hispanic immigrants have displaced blacks as the largest minority. One would expect, based on national victimization surveys and incarceration rates showing that blacks commit violent crimes at far higher rates than either non-Hispanic whites or Hispanics—to see crime rates fall as Hispanics move in.

And they have.