Topic: WorldNetDaily
In the course of defending Michael Savage from a San Francisco City Council resolution condemning him for using "defamatory language" against immigrants, Mychal Massie writes in his Aug. 14 WorldNetDaily column:
InFoWars.com notes: "Since illegal aliens are unlikely to be committing white-collar crimes, that figure likely underestimates the amount of violent crime committed by illegal aliens." Using said report, Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, pointed out that 25 Americans are killed by illegals every day (about evenly split between motor vehicle accidents and outright murder). That's more than 9,000 murdered a year, or about 36,000 in the past four years. That is roughly 10 times more than the total number of Americans killed in Iraq.
In fact, as Colorado Media Matters has detailed (and as we've previously noted), King has no hard numbers to back that up; King merely misleadingly "extrapolated" figures from an April 2005 Government Accountability Office study, which found that 27 percent of the federal prison population is made up of "criminal aliens," to formulate the questionable statistic regarding the number of deaths caused by illegal immigrants. But the federal prison population is only about 7.5 percent of the total U.S. prison population, which makes King's extrapolation wildly overblown.
This, unsurprisingly, gives Massie a platform to rant against illegal immigrants, claiming that "liberal Democrats and Republicans ... view illegal aliens that are breaking our laws, potentially undermining elections, bleeding the middle-class dry, raping and murdering as just the model citizenry we need more of" and railing against "innocent, clean living black students" who are "brutally assaulted and murdered, by animalistic, illegal aliens."
