Saturday, January 12, 2008

To Russell Pearce's friends: Take his email privileges away. Immediately.

...Because he apparently hasn't learned the lesson contained in the whole "National Alliance" debacle from 2006...


As part of my research for blogging, I've created "Google Alerts" for news and blog posts concerning a number of AZ political types, including State Rep. Russell Pearce (R-National Alliance).

The last Pearce update brought to my attention a post from "The Novice Bear," written by Paul Stiles, someone who focuses almost exclusively on economics and the stock market.

In December, he wrote a post criticizing Pearce's opinion of the economic effects of deporting illegal immigrants.

Well, Pearce actually responded to that particular post (color me jealous - he never responds to my posts about him :)) ) in an email to the author.

Apparently, the email is long and rather rambling, but the upshot of it was that Rep. Pearce blames all of AZ's economic woes on undocumented immigrants (ignoring little details like skyrocketing oil and gas prices, and plummeting home values).

The author quoted the email (it was too long to post). Here the quotes, from both the post and a comment on the post -

You should understand our "Sovereign" rights as a nation. The Rule of Law. The damage to America and Americans.26 AMERICANS DIE DAILY AT THE HANDS OF THESE "ILLEGALS" EVERY YEAR. 25 EVERYDAY, 12 BY STABBINGS AND SHOOTINGS AND 13 BY DUI AND OTHER RELATED CRIMES. APPARENTLY YOU AND OTHERS COULD CARE LESS ABOUT....AND OUR GOVERNMENT WILL SHED NOT ONE TEAR OVER THIS..THIS IS FROM A CONGRESSIONAL REPORT. (AZ Officers murdered, Officer Atkins, Officer Erfle, Officer Martin, Officer Eggle, and the list goes on!!!!$2 billion annually in Arizona to educate illegal alien children in K - 12.


{snip}

"I want you to know how I reverence the Constitution; this sacred document given to us by God through the Founders that sought inspiration as they forged this inspired document."
Mr. Stiles goes on to shred Pearce's basic contention about the effect of illegal immigration on violent crime, specifically murder rates (check out his graphs; they're eye-opening.)

The quoted sections of the email show Rep. Pearce to be not only a "one trick pony" in that nearly every fiber of his being is consumed by his obsession with immigrants, but that he is also a singularly unprofessional writer (hey, I'm not exactly the reincarnation of H.L. Mencken, but at least I don't overuse my CAPS LOCK button.)

To be fair, the quotes may be taken out of context, so I've asked Mr. Stiles to forward the email so as to post it in its entirety.

Somehow, though, I don't expect that will change anything. :)

Years ago, there was an anti-drunk driving ad campaign with the tagline "Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk."

Pearce's friends should amend that to "Friends Don't Let Russell Email. Period."

3 comments:

Richard said...

As someone who's taught writing on the college level for over 33 years, I find the quality of his writing appalling, far worse than the average student in freshman comp.

Beyond that, his statistics are simply, in Paul Stiles' words, "insane."

Ramiro Martinez Jr., a professor of criminal justice at Florida International University, has sifted through homicide records in border cities like San Diego and El Paso, both heavily populated by Mexican immigrants, both places where violent crime has fallen significantly in recent years. He discovered that the homicide rate for Hispanics was lower than for other groups, even though their poverty rate was very high, if not the highest, in these metropolitan areas. He found the same thing in the Haitian neighborhoods of Miami.

In his book “New York Murder Mystery,” the criminologist Andrew Karmen examined the trend in New York City -- where the 2007 murder rate was the lowest since 1963, when I was 12 years old -- and likewise found that the “disproportionately youthful, male and poor immigrants” who arrived during the 1980s and 1990s “were surprisingly law-abiding” and that their settlement into once-decaying neighborhoods helped “put a brake on spiraling crime rates.”

The most prominent advocate of the “more immigrants, less crime” theory is Robert J. Sampson, chairman of the sociology department at Harvard. Sampson was an author of a 2005 article in The American Journal of Public Health that reported the findings of a detailed study of crime in Chicago. Based on information gathered on the perpetrators of more than 3,000 violent acts committed between 1995 and 2002, supplemented by police records and community surveys, it found that the rate of violence among Mexican-Americans was significantly lower than among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.

First-generation immigrants are about 45 percent less likely to commit crimes than third-generation immigrants. In turn, second-generation immigrants are about a quarter less likely to commit crime than third-generation.

So, in other words, native Americans, those born here and whose parents are born here, are the most violent and the most criminal.

Immigrants are less likely to be imprisoned relative to their numbers; Latinos, in particular, even though they enter the country being disproportionately poor, which would signal, based on everything else we know, that they would have a high risk for all sorts of negative outcomes, including poor health, low-birth-weight babies, incarceration, violence and so forth, are less likely to be imprisoned. They are doing rather well in many dimensions, and this has led to what is known in the literature as "the Latino paradox." And the paradox is just that -- even though they are disproportionately poor and have all kinds of risk factors, they are doing better in many dimensions.

Paul Stiles said...

Hello Craig,

I forwarded you Pearce's email. Enjoy!

Paul

Exurban Jon said...

"I want you to know how I reverence the Constitution; this sacred document given to us by God through the Founders that sought inspiration as they forged this inspired document."

Don't get me wrong. I "reverence" the Constitution as much as the next guy (you might even say I "revere" it). However, Pearce thinks it is a "sacred document" of God? What-huh?! Does that include the compromise counting slaves as 3/5 human?

However, if is is so sacred, he must be against ever amending the Word of God with human ideas like the DoMA, etc.