"We Must Do Someting About Those Native Born Legal Citizens!"

I first heard about this on NPR but couldn't find the link to it, so here is the New York Times article about the study:

Immigrants in the state, about 35 percent of adults, are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, according to a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan research group. Among men ages 18 to 40, the group most likely to commit crimes, native-born Americans were 10 times more likely than immigrants to be incarcerated for crimes in California prisons and jails. The study included both legal and illegal immigrants, without focusing separately on illegal immigrants. But it found that native-born American men ages 18 to 40 were at least eight times more likely to be imprisoned for crimes than Mexican immigrants in that age range who were not naturalized citizens — a group likely to have a high percentage of illegal immigrants.

So where's the press and the indignation of "native" born citizens over our most dangerous and menacing population in the United States, which is native born American citizens.

Opponents to immigration reform and to undocumented workers have been shouting for years about the "dangers" of "illegal" immigration, especially immigration from countries filled with brown people.

"OH THE HUMANITY! ALL THEM COLORED FOLKS!"

Obviously much of our suspicion was right all along. And this study is but one of the many things that proves it.

It's not surprising, however, that oppenents of immigrants "legal" or "illegal" will use scare tactics such as this to lash out against immigrants of color. Crime was one thing that kept whites riled up about newly freed Blacks (and still does mind you) in the 19th century; crime and drukeness was a propaganda tool that the white establishment used against the Irish; crime and fear of job losses was what whites also used against the Chinese in the 19th century and which helped pass the Chinese Exclusion Act; fear was used against Italian and other Eastern European immigrants in the late 19th and early 20th century, those crazy Italians and their strange Catholic and filth ridden ways would overrun "American culture" (i.e. WASP culture); and the list goes on.

Much of these peoples fears are mainly based on the fear of the "dark skinned man" which has been a sometimes subtle, and not so subtle, undercurrent in American history.

And, as we can see, it still goes on today. One of the main issues that many opponents of immigration (mainly immigration of people of color from underdeveloped countries) use is "lose of culture," and yet when they say "lose of culture" or the "Balkanization of America" they mean the undercutting of the dominant culture in the United States, which is White Anglo Saxon [Christian] Culture, which is the culture of the ruling elite.

Image From:
Welker's Wikinomics Blog