Malkin\’s Hasty Generalization

26 April, 2006. 507 words.

Mrs. Krehbiel has noted that I tend to rag on liberals more than conservatives, so this one’s for her: Michelle Malkin: The victims of illegal immigration. I tend to like Malkin’s blog because it’s mostly news and links that you never see in the media, but I find that when she writes opinions, they end up sounding a little shrewish.

She seems to have a knack for generalization (specifically, “hasty generalization”). Frequently, she’ll take the actions of a few and apply them to an entire group, and use this as an argument for some sort of conservative policy. This is normal human behavior, but one would expect a self-professed “investigative journalist” to be a little smarter than that. In the above article, for example, she tells us about Angel Resendiz, an illegal immigrant who raped, killed, and otherwise caused a great deal of harm to a bunch of people over a 25-year period. From this one example, we’re supposed to conclude that every illegal immigrant is going to rape and kill us, but if we just throw them all out and close the borders forever, we’ll be safe.

Clearly, this is a ridiculous argument. (Clear to me, at least.) Malkin fails to mention exactly how many illegal immigrants are sitting on death row*, so therefore we must conclude there’s just the one. So, let’s see… 1 murderer out of 11-12 million illegal immigrants. Once again, we find that the average person has a much, much higher chance of dying in a regular old car accident than at the hands of a nutty illegal immigrant. (Reminder: In 1998, 49,304 died in accidents in North America — for comparison, 58,226 U.S. soldiers died in the entire Vietnam War and, according to Malkin, Angel Resendiz killed 12 people over the course of 25 years.) And without even bothering to look up actual statistics, I’m quite sure there are plenty of bona fide U.S. citizens running around raping and killing people.

My point is that the discussion of whether or not we close up the borders should not include the actions of merely one nutty illegal immigrant. No matter how much security we impose, we’re never going to be safe from the proverbial “lone gunman.” (A secondary point is that most people should worry more about their drive to work every day than the country’s borders.)

* I'll do Malkin's fact-checking for her: ["The 367 Hispanic inmates under sentence of death at yearend 2004 accounted for 13% of inmates with a known ethnicity."][5] There is no mention of whether they were illegal immigrants or not. If we presume that all 367 of them were illegal immigrants (out of the 11-12 _million_ in the country), and they each killed 12 people over a span of 25 years, then the total American deaths at the hands of nutty illegal immigrants reaches 4,404. Recall that 49,304 died in traffic accidents in 1998. If we crudely extrapolate that over 25 years, we get 1,232,600 deaths. So, remind me again, which deserves more of Malkin's outrage?

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