I was just listening to Steven King, the minority member on the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law suggest that although it was a shame that Peter Guzman's mother had to go through the morgues of Tijuana looking for him, relatives in the United States have to go to the morgues, too: I would point out there are mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters that go to morgues every day in America because of the failure to enforce immigration laws. 27% of inmates in penitentiaries are criminal aliens.
At least as outrageous as trying to downplay the desperation and horror of a mother searching for her U.S.-born, cognitively impaired son in Tijuana morgues, is the insinuation that criminals are more likely to be foreign born than U.S. natives.
Only a small percentage of the total prison population are in federal institutions. Most are held in state and local prisons or jails. According to the Department of Justice, 6.7% of the entire prison population is foreign-born, but about 13% of the U.S. population is foreign-born. This means that King's own demographic of the native born is overrepresented in the prison population.
Indeed an SSRC study using census data also found that within respective ethnic and racial groups, immigrants across the board were less likely than native born citizens to be incarcerated.
Considering that men are 90% of the prison population and that King is a man, perhaps his first step in controlling crime by statistical grandstanding would be to deport himself, maybe to a quiet, remedial math camp somewhere in Europe. (The man on the right in the photo from King's webpage is King.)
