LULAC leader blames Americans for crimes by Mexicans (funny stuff)

DALLAS - After a federal study revealed that a look at 100 illegal immigrants previously arrested and released for breaking state or local law had on an average been arrested six times, the president of the Dallas chapter of the League of United Latin Amercian Citizens (LULAC) made a controversial remark that has been the talk of the town.

Jesse Diaz, the LULAC leader, said while the report is flawed, he stands by his comments that if Americans want to blame anybody, they need to blame themselves.

"Now that they come to the United States, they're picking up those bad habits of shooting [and] drinking drugs," he said.

Diaz made the statement first on KRLD 1080 talk radio, where the phone lines lit-up as well as the shows' hosts and listeners.

"I heard that comment he made yesterday," said one listener who called into the statement. "My mouth just flew open. I was like, okay."

"If you have to break the laws to get here initially, what respect are you going to have for our laws," said DJ Jay McFarland.

But Diaz said he won't back down. From his Pleasant Grove real estate office, he said he sees a deteriortion of Mexico's conservative Catholic values in everything from sagging pants to teen pregnancies to broken homes.

But what Diaz said worries him the most is that the study only looked at 100 who broke criminal laws, but cast a cloud over the millions whose only crime is crossing the border illegally

"It teaches them to hate immigrants, and the majority of these immigrants are good people," he said.

The Department of Homeland Security agreed the study is flawed, and the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a statement noting it was neither statistically significant or objective.

Excerpted from

January 15, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative

Fragmented Future

Multiculturalism doesn’t make vibrant communities but defensive ones.

In America, you don’t need to belong to a family-based mafia for protection because the state will enforce your contracts with some degree of equality before the law. In Mexico, though, as former New York Times correspondent Alan Riding wrote in his 1984 bestseller Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans, “Public life could be defined as the abuse of power to achieve wealth and the abuse of wealth to achieve power.” Anyone outside the extended family is assumed to have predatory intentions, which explains the famous warmth and solidarity of Mexican families. “Mexicans need few friends,” Riding observed, “because they have many relatives.”

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 deep-rooted Mexican attitudes largely account for why, in Putnam’s “Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey,” Los Angeles ended up looking a lot like it did in the Oscar-winning movie “Crash.” I once asked a Hollywood agent why there are so many brother acts among filmmakers these days, such as the Coens, Wachowskis, Farrellys, and Wayans. “Who else can you trust?” he shrugged.

The press secretary for the California Republican Party is the son of illegal aliens who came the USA 35 years ago. In this article he chronicles how in recent years there has been a massive change in the number and kind of illegals coming north. Including a crimnal element that is causing a deterioration in the quality of life of Americans. Consider this article Illegal aliens murder 12 Americans daily Death toll in 2006 far overshadows total U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, Afghanistan

People have been referring to the Captains Quarters as a rebuke to the assertions of the article. The Captain's Quarters makes the assertion that -- for the numbers to be true -- it would have to be the case that a small number of people were committing a lot of crimes. That is to say far outside the statistical norm for the USA. The problem is that he didn't actually check the federal stats. As it happens it is the case that illegals tend to be very repeat offenders.

Below are some government stats to back up the article's assertioms

From the FBI crime statistics * An estimated 16,692 persons were murdered nationwide in 2005, an increase of 3.4 percent from the 2004 figure. * Murder comprised 1.2 percent of the overall estimated number of violent crimes in 2005. (Based on Table 1.) * There were an estimated 5.6 murders per 100,000 inhabitants.

Illegal Alien Crime Wave

On April 7, 2005, the US Justice Department issued a report on criminal aliens that were incarcerated in federal and state prisons and local jails. In the population study of 55,322 illegal aliens, researchers found that they were arrested at least a total of 459,614 times, averaging about 8 arrests per illegal alien. Nearly all had more than 1 arrest. Thirty-eight percent (about 21,000) had between 2 and 5 arrests, 32 percent (about 18,000) had between 6 and 10 arrests, and 26 percent (about 15,000) had 11 or more arrests. Most of the arrests occurred after 1990. They were arrested for a total of about 700,000 criminal offenses, averaging about 13 offenses per illegal alien. One arrest incident may include multiple offenses, a fact that explains why there are nearly one and half times more offenses than arrests. Almost all of these illegal aliens were arrested for more than 1 offense. Slightly more than half of the 55,322 illegal aliens had between 2 and 10 offenses.

CRIMINAL HISTORY

More than two-thirds of the defendants charged with an immigration offense were identified as having been previously arrested. Thirty-six percent had been arrested on at least 5 prior occasions; 22%, 2 to 4 times; and 12%,1 time. Sixty-one percent of those defendants had been convicted at least once; 18%, 5 or more times; 26%, 2 to 4 times; and 17%, 1 time. Of those charged, 49% had previously been convicted of a felony: 20% of a drug offense; 18%, a violent offense; and 11%, other felony offenses. Twelve percent had previously been convicted of a misdemeanor. Defendants charged with unlawful reentry had the most extensive criminal histories. Nine in ten had been previously arrested. Of those with a prior arrest, half had been arrested on at least 5 prior occasions. Fifty-six percent of those charged with a reentry offense had previously been convicted of a violent or drug-related felony. By contrast, under half of those charged with alien smuggling, a third of those charged with unlawful entry, and just over a quarter those charged with misuse of visas and other charges had previously been arrested. The criminal histories of these defendants were generally less extensive: more than 70% had been previously arrested fewer than 5 times. Sources: US Department of Homeland Security, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, National Security Institute, National Association of Chiefs of Police, US Department of Justice

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