Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Illegal Aliens And Crime

Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona writes in NRO with some startling statistics about the number of illegal aliens committing crimes. A Government Accountability Office study showed that 55,322 criminal aliens were arrested a total of at least 459,614 times, averaging over eight arrests per alien. The Department of Justice expressed its surprise at the "extremely high" rate of re-arrests for criminal aliens when it found that that 73 criminal aliens in a study group were arrested a total of 429 times. In FY06, the Border Patrol apprehended 142,365 criminal aliens on the borders. Of that number, 20,480 had committed major crimes, including homicide (444), kidnapping (145), sexual assault (523), robbery (947), assault (6,276), and drug crimes (12,730).

And those were just the ones they caught!

Kyl calls for more resources and better enforcement, not only at the border but also at the local level all around the country. I think it's a bit strange coming from Kyl -- one of the main Republican proponents of this summer's amnesty bill -- but the numbers and ideas are dead on, even if Kyl's motivations may be suspect.

There's my two cents.

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