Chicago City Wire

A columnist is hiding behind semantics and a dearth of data in his attack on Republicans for blaming a surge in illegal alien crime on the Biden/Harris administration, according to Don Rosenberg, President of Advocates for Victims of Illegal Alien Crime (AVIAC).

The New York Times column, “The Myth of Migrant Crime,” by German Lopez insists there is no migrant crime surge as claimed by former President Donald Trump and other Republican leaders.

“Trump and other Republicans have suggested that immigrants are especially likely to be criminals,” Lopez wrote. “They point to a few anecdotes. But the data shows the opposite: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. There are genuine issues with the border and illegal immigration, but more crime is not one of them.”

In response, Rosenberg wrote in a recent email message to Lopez that it’s clear that Republicans are not talking about immigrants, but illegal aliens.

“If the media correctly labeled each group of people under discussion instead of calling them all migrants or immigrants, and the virtue signalers didn’t get their panties in a ringer when illegal aliens were correctly labeled as illegal aliens, there would be a lot less confusion,” he wrote to Lopez.

Rosenberg, who in 2010 lost a son in San Francisco to an illegal driving without a license, said that those benefiting from illegals, notably businesses looking for cheap labor, and the Democratic Party, need to “sanitize those known as illegal aliens.”

“Most of the media, led by the AP, were all too happy to comply," he said. "Illegal aliens became illegal immigrants, then undocumented immigrants, and now, all too often, just immigrants or migrants."

Rosenberg added that Lopez is also off base citing studies that show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than those born in the U.S.

The studies of illegal alien crime “suffer greatly from data deprivation. Whether an immigrant or an illegal alien, there is a tremendous amount of undercounting,” Rosenberg said. "The native-born are almost never identified as being an immigrant or an illegal alien, but those very same people are often unidentified or counted as native-born.”

And comparing "migrant crime" to the overall crime rate, as Lopez does, indicates nothing.

"The murder rate or the general crime rate, the crimes committed by a subset of 11 million would have no impact on the rate established by the 330 million," he said. "Think of pouring a few gallons of red dye into a swimming pool. You wouldn't see any red dye after a few minutes of dissipating. But a careful analysis of the water tells you it’s there."

Finally, Rosenberg said that sanctuary jurisdictions rarely attempt to identify immigration status, and in many areas, it’s illegal to do so.

Lopez has yet to respond to his email message, Rosenberg told Chicago City Wire in an email. 

"Very rarely—less than five percent of the time, and that’s being generous – does anyone from the MSM [mainstream media] ever respond," he said. "When they do, it’s usually nothing more than, 'Sorry for your loss.'"  

Rosenberg added that he's finished writing op-eds because they never get published. 

"The LA Times hasn’t published any op-ed that’s critical of illegal immigration in at least seven years," he said. "It's not much different for other pubs, but I could have missed it (doubtful). I have every LA Times immigration story, op-ed, and even letters to the editor dating back to 2017, and many more prior."

In Chicago, an emerging arrest trend supports Rosenberg’s arguments, a recent analysis of Chicago police records show.

Chicago police (CPD) have arrested those born in Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia in record numbers over the past few years, according to a breakdown of CPD arrest figures by James Bosco of the Chicago Contrarian. This, while arrest rates of those American born, or those born in some other foreign countries, like Puerto Rico and Mexico, have remained mostly flat.

“A trend that continued, the rate of foreign-born arrestees rose to 18.7 percent in 2022, and in 2023, it continued to rise steadily to 24.9 percent,” Bosco reported. “Through July of this year, it is running at 31.9 percent. In sum, over the last three-year period, the rate at which CPD arrests foreign-born individuals has nearly tripled.”

Overall, arrests in Chicago continued to drop in 2021 with fewer than 75,000 arrests. But since 2021, the total number of arrests has slowly risen, with CPD arresting 91,652 in 2023, Bosco reported.