Dougherty Arts Center
Anti-Immigration Letter Offered Phony Statistics Based on Racism Rather Than Sources
RECEIVED Mon., June 26, 2006
Editor,
Recently, you published a letter [“Postmarks,” June 23] from an individual who had problems with Michael Ventura's take on the immigration issue [“Letters @ 3am,” May 26]. To support his argument, he provided some statistics. To use the language of that letter-writer, he is full of shit. I've had this argument with other immigrant-phobes and they tend to use the same inaccurate numbers. Moreover, the writer seems offended by the belief that racism might be coloring their views. Frankly, I'm offended that the letter-writer is willing to take some clearly outrageous figures at face value without doing any fact-checking and/or misuse statistics to exaggerate his case. Unfortunately, though the writer can throw out wild figures without context, correcting his falsehoods would take more words that this format allows.
I can provide an example, however, of his disingenuousness. His first statistic: "According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 28% of the inmates are illegals." What does that mean? How many inmates? Even though that statistic sounds terribly frightening, in actual numbers it means something a lot less, to wit (2004 statistics):
91,789 noncitizens were in federal and state prisons that included 34,000-plus federal. Translate this to a percentage and we get roughly 4.5% of state and federal inmates were noncitizens in 2004 (91,781 of a population of 1,900,000-plus). Present-day numbers reflect the same percentages.
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim04.pdf.
All the letter-writer's figures can be similarly deconstructed. However, it's easy to throw bombs and much harder to fix the misconceptions created.
Recently, you published a letter [“Postmarks,” June 23] from an individual who had problems with Michael Ventura's take on the immigration issue [“Letters @ 3am,” May 26]. To support his argument, he provided some statistics. To use the language of that letter-writer, he is full of shit. I've had this argument with other immigrant-phobes and they tend to use the same inaccurate numbers. Moreover, the writer seems offended by the belief that racism might be coloring their views. Frankly, I'm offended that the letter-writer is willing to take some clearly outrageous figures at face value without doing any fact-checking and/or misuse statistics to exaggerate his case. Unfortunately, though the writer can throw out wild figures without context, correcting his falsehoods would take more words that this format allows.
I can provide an example, however, of his disingenuousness. His first statistic: "According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, 28% of the inmates are illegals." What does that mean? How many inmates? Even though that statistic sounds terribly frightening, in actual numbers it means something a lot less, to wit (2004 statistics):
91,789 noncitizens were in federal and state prisons that included 34,000-plus federal. Translate this to a percentage and we get roughly 4.5% of state and federal inmates were noncitizens in 2004 (91,781 of a population of 1,900,000-plus). Present-day numbers reflect the same percentages.
www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pjim04.pdf.
All the letter-writer's figures can be similarly deconstructed. However, it's easy to throw bombs and much harder to fix the misconceptions created.
Noel Gonzales
