Immigration and Mexicans
How to Lie with Statistics
1) "Did you know that "95 percent of warrants for murder in Los Angeles are for illegal aliens?" Or that "75 percent of people on the Most Wanted List in Los Angeles are illegal aliens"? What's more, "Over [two-thirds] of all births in Los Angeles County are to illegal alien Mexicans on [Medicaid] whose births were paid for by taxpayers."[i]
2) "They've run Americans out of countless cities and communities. They've trashed school systems and bankrupted 86 hospitals. They've thrown trash throughout the park systems. They defy laws by not carrying car insurance, driver's licenses, and work off the books paying no taxes, brutalize our schools with their language, spread drugs, and more terrifying are the thousands of cases of TB and hepatitis they spread into Los Angeles. " [ii]
Neither of these quotes is true. Though they've been heard in countless websites.
The source of quote number one was an email that someone posted online and off it went like a wildfire spreading through a California countryside.
Someone even gave as the source of point number one as the Los Angeles Times newspaper. Quote number two, which I got from the anti-Mexican/illegal-legal immigrants crusader, Frosty Wooldridge, apparently was fabricated.
When I read Wooldridge's screed, in 2005, I was immediately suspicious and contacted the Center for Disease Control. That, by the way, is what honest writers do. I talked with, Jessica Frickey, Health Communications Specialist. Ms. Frickey said this:
"I am attaching CDC's most recent fact sheet on 2004 TB surveillance data. You will see that while TB was at an all time low in 2004, progress to eliminate the disease may be slowing. As far as your specific question about illegal immigrants causing a rise in TB, CDC's data shows that foreign-born individuals - whether illegal immigrants or legal immigrants - accounted for more than half of TB cases reported in 2004. Overall, racial and ethnic minorities also face higher rates of disease than white Americans, with both Hispanics and Blacks at a rate that is 8 times higher than whites and Asians 20 times higher than whites. Despite these numbers, CDC does not have data to show that foreign-born individuals have caused an increase in TB in recent years."[iii]
It would seem that Mr. Wooldridge was a little "loosey-goosey" with the facts. In another article I read Wooldridge pulls the same stunt:
Bill Steigerwald, Associate editor/columnist with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review Pittsburgh, observed in 2003:
"Frosty the "snow" man?
Friday, November 21, 2003.
"Frosty Wooldridge has been peddling a screed - a version of which you ran ["Our Country Coming Undone," November 12] - to op-ed pages of newspapers claiming that it was illegal aliens who served up Hepatitis A to folks here at a Chi-Chi's. Your site carried this b.s.--"You may have read in the newspapers: "... 34 children in a Michigan school tested positive for Tuberculosis"; or in Monaco, Pennsylvania, "Two people died of Hepatitis A," while 1,110 other patrons of Chi-Chi's Restaurants were 'served' the disease by six illegal alien employees." I don't know how Frosty the snowman got this info, because we haven't heard it yet. I exchanged e-mails with him earlier the week of November 10, telling him he was either wrong or lying. (He had sent us an email pitching his op-ed). Health officials here have had no idea how the problem here started (they still don't whether it came from an employee or a food source, such as green onions); no paper here has said a word about illegal or legal aliens. Frosty's zeal, as I told him, has gotten the better of him. I wouldn't trust any of his "facts" without checking them. We'll never run anything he sends us."
...he was either wrong or lying".-Need I say more?
The false attribution to the L.A. Times was found to be sheer fabrication and neither were the claimed "facts" true either. The L.A. Times looked into the so-called facts someone attributed to it and found none could be substantiated. The statistic that is often spouted by those who "hate Mexicans", and let's face it-HATREDIS WHAT THIS IS ABOUT-that "62 percent of all births in Los Angeles County are to Hispanic women,"[iv] was also found to be a stretch. This figure applied to AMERICAN CITIZEN as well as to legal aliens from other Latin American countries. What these stats truly represent is often conveniently left out of dialogue and blogs. Or, perhaps not. Maybe it is quoted as a true representation of their hatred of all things Hispanic.
Just what does it take to admit that an awful lot that comes out of the anti-Mexican/Latino/Hispanics movement is nothing but a bunch of bull?
People simply make stuff up. It's done all the time.
Is this not the case?
And this non-sense that there is a well-organized movement or plot to "take back the American Southwest-reconquista-is too sad to call even laughable.
Perhaps each American who really wants to evaluate this problem critically should read the book, How to Lie With Statistics, by Darrell Huff, Irving Geis:
"There is terror in numbers," writes Darrell Huff in How to Lie with Statistics. And nowhere does this terror translate to blind acceptance of authority more than in the slippery world of averages, correlations, graphs, and trends. The book remains relevant as a wake-up call for people unaccustomed to examining the endless flow of numbers pouring from Wall Street, Madison Avenue, and everywhere else someone has an axe to grind, a point to prove, or a product to sell. "The secret language of statistics, so appealing in a fact-minded culture, is employed to sensationalize, inflate, confuse, and oversimplify," warns Huff".[v]
[i] http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ChuckColson/2006/06/09/defending_the_strangers_in_our_midst
[ii] MEXICANIZATION OF AMERICA; By Frosty Wooldridge May 30, 2005 NewsWithViews.com
http://www.newswithviews.com/Wooldridge/frosty59.htm
iii http://www.ezinearticles.com/?Mexicans:-
Disease-Ridden-or-a-lot-of-Hype?&id=42430
iv http://www.townhall.com/columnists/ChuckColson/
2006/06/09/defending_the_strangers_in_our_midst
Published by Expat_2003
Doug Bower is a freelance writer and book author. Some of his writing credits include The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Houston Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Associated Content, Transitions Abroa... View profile
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1 Comments
Post a CommentI live in Tucson, Arizona. Xenophones ABOUND here. Thank you for writing these. I'll be reading each and everyone. I've been wanting to learn as much as I can from all sides of the story, especially in regards to the way of life in Mexico. I run into a lot of people who use very similar quotes in their argument. One man in a local forum even said that Mexican nationals live quite well in Mexico they just want the free money the U.S. doesn't seem to mind handing out to them. lol. I'm guessing he's never been to Mexico. Even when you disprove them, they stand by it. Amazing. Good article. :)