Sickened by the Xenophobes: Fact Check!

Suddenly, a bankrupt Republican party is trying to capitalize on immigrant-hating to drum up a base that feels defeated without a single vote being cast. Just today, political architect Newt Gingrich, a potential candidate for the 2008 Presidency, said he is "sickened with Bush and Congress" for going on vacation while "young Americans are massacred" by illegal immigrants. Presidential hopefuls Guilani and Romney weighed in too, with the former referring to an invasion, all alluding to the high crime these immigrants bring along.

Unfortunately for them, it's a myth! The Immigration Policy Center at the American Immigration Law Foundation reviewed 2000 Census data and came up with some pretty interesting (and inconvenient, for the xenophobes) findings:

• A native-born man, ages 18-39, is 5 times more likely to be incarcerated.
  
• Foreign born incarceration rates are 2.5x less than the native white man and 17x less than the native black man.
  
• Across ethnic groups, the incarceration rates for the foreign-born men are less than those for the native-born men.

But then it gets even more interesting...

• Incarceration rates of foreign-born men, as well as other issues like family disintegration and drug and alcohol addiction, increase with duration of stay in the US, although still less than comparable rates for native-born men.
  
• Immigrants, especially from Latin America, give birth to fewer underweight babies and have lower rates of adult and child mortality despite poverty and barriers to proper health care.

Wow! That stunned me, and it should serve as a wake-up call to the populace that hate is not the answer. Their positions on immigration are a large part of why Guilani, Romney, Gingrich and others won't get my symbolic vote this election cycle. (Symbolic because I'm not a US citizen)