The five MAGAs representing Virginia in the U.S. House, four of whom are lame ducks, want Gov. Abigail Spanberger to rescind her executive order terminating existing agreements for local law-enforcement agencies in the Commonwealth to work with ICE.
Good luck with that.
“Under the Biden-Harris administration, the Commonwealth of Virginia faced a dangerous surge of illegal immigration,” the fivesome wrote in a letter to Spanberger dated Thursday, Feb. 5, and posted on the Facebook page of Sixth District MAGA lame duck Ben Cline on Monday.
The letter claims that there are “approximately 361,000 unauthorized individuals” residing in Virginia, “raising the risk of criminal activity in our local communities.”
That figure comes from the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.
They went with the MPI number because it’s the highest number of any of the estimates that you can find in a quick Google search.
The MAGAs didn’t want us to track down the source, because MPI’s data tells us that there was no “dangerous surge” during the Biden-Harris administration.
They’re not going to like that I do my homework on these kinds of things.
Per MPI data, just 82,000 people among our 361,000 undocumented individuals here in the good ol’ Commonwealth have been in the U.S. less than five years, which would cover the entirety of the Biden-Harris years.
Ahem, “dangerous surge.”
The other 279,000 undocumented folks have been here at least five years, per MPI; 124,000 have been here for at least 20.
These chuckers really shouldn’t have used MPI as their source, because there’s loads of good stuff there.
- The unemployment rate for our undocumenteds: 4 percent.
- Married to a U.S. citizen: 17 percent.
- College degrees: 18 percent.
- Homeowners: 33 percent.
- Income at or above 200 percent of federal poverty level: 58 percent.
- Age 35-plus: 58 percent.
The Migration Policy Institute, again, bad source for the MAGAs to cite here, also tells us that “(i)mmigrants in the United States commit crimes at lower rates than the U.S.-born population, notwithstanding the assertion by critics that immigration is linked to higher rates of criminal activity.”
Citing a 2020 study, MPI tells us that undocumented immigrants were arrested at:
- Less than half the rate of U.S.-born citizens for violent and drug crimes.
- One-quarter of the rate of the U.S. born for property crimes.
Why did the MAGAs send us to MPI?
Really shouldn’t have done that.
Because the very source of their data is telling us that Spanberger did precisely the right thing with her executive order terminating existing agreements for local law-enforcement agencies in the Commonwealth to work with ICE.
The Trumpers like them a good old-fashioned dog-and-pony show.
This is why we fire assholes who sign their names to stupid letters.
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Chris Graham
