Bad Logic Against The Border Wall

"The crime rate among immigrants is actually lower than the crime rate among non immigrants."

In the midst of this current squabble over the border wall, the 'lower crime rate among immigrants' meme keeps getting tossed out as if it's somehow meaningful. But, with a little parsing, the argument is really nothing more than the usual bias-confirming rhetoric offered by opponents to the president. In this case, too, just handful of words is such a tangle of specious reasoning that it signals an absence of logic in either its inventors or its audience. (We suspect the failure is in those who accept the argument and that the crafters are only disingenuous.)

And it's such a tangle, too, that it's difficult to know how to begin with it. Maybe begin with the words 'among immigrants'? The issue at hand is, obviously, not immigration but the entirely separate issue of illegal immigration. Or maybe we could start with the words 'among non-immigrants'. This portion of the argument commits what is known as the 'tu quoque' fallacy. It essentially argues "no you!"

But the deeper clumsiness of the logic is in its attack on numbers rather than type. Crime among illegal immigrants (apart from the original crime of sneaking across the border) is a problem not because of its frequency but because of its quality. Human trafficking, savage violence and industrial-grade drug distribution are the crimes under discussion, not the generalized 'crime rate' of whatever unmentioned statistics might be on the minds of those who peddle this half-baked meme.

Furthermore, however much murder, slavery and drug-pushing American citizens might get up to, what is the sense of importing more?

The complex failure of the simple statement that immigrants commit less crime than non-immigrants is so total that it's incorrect to call the logic bad. The logic is, in fact, non-existent. The innards of this meme are so poorly formed that we worry for the future of the Republic. If this is the type of thinking we apply to our great national questions, there may not be much hope for our future.