Roy Exum: We Are Biased Creatures

  • Wednesday, August 26, 2015
  • Roy Exum
Roy Exum
Roy Exum

There is a fascinating story looping like crazy on the internet entitled, “What If 20 Million Illegal Immigrants Vacated America.” The story, allegedly written by Denver newspaper columnist Tina Griego in 2007, just “got legs” after presidential candidate Donald Trump is saying “We Need A Wall” between the United States and Mexico. On the Sunday news show Trump veiled his punch, saying on ‘Meet The Press,’ “We want people to come in. I want people to come in. They have to be wonderful people.

They have to come in legally.”

Everybody knows the United States has a huge problem with illegal immigrants (those who have no papers) and by Trump’s count there are 11 million. The real answer is that nobody knows how many illegals are here but that’s not the point. Be careful when it comes to stories that are “too good to be true.”

Tina Griego never wrote the inflammatory story, “What If 20 Million Illegal Immigrants Vacated America.” No, she’s a professional journalist with the Denver Post and “A Mexican Visitor’s Lament” was, in fact, written by a somewhat biased man who “stole” Tina’s name to give credence to his faulty claims and his apparent prejudice.

For example, he wrote, “In Colorado, 500,000 illegal migrants, plus their 300,000 kids and grand-kids – would move back ‘home’, mostly to Mexico. That would save Coloradans an estimated $2 billion (other experts say $7 billion) annually in taxes that pay for schooling, medical, social-services and incarceration costs. It means 12,000 gang members would vanish out of Denver alone.”

But there is a problem – that’s not true. In 2011 Tina had a column that said she never wrote the drivel that is now swirling on the web. Here’s part of what she did write refuting the cyber-column several years ago:

You know the children's game “Operator?” Someone whispers a sentence to the next person who whispers it to the next person and so on until the words, mangled now, reach the last person. Something similar happened here. That cyber-column went everywhere online. Along the way, the local man's name disappeared from many versions, and I became known as the author. I tried to correct the record when this first happened almost three years ago.

Alas, nothing ever disappears on the Internet. It remains dormant until Arizona passes a controversial law targeting illegal immigrants. It's like electricity jolting Frankenstein. The column, now attributed to me, is resurrected. Copied word-for-fictional-word. Forwarded along to be forwarded along until my e-mail is full of queries. They tend to fall into three categories: a) God Bless You, You're a Patriot, b) Where Do These Numbers Come From and c) What Kind of Idiot Are You?

For the pure, ornery heck of it, I called Mary Dulacki, our fair city's record coordinator for the Office of the Manager of Safety. You want numbers, she's got them. I called her three years ago too. You have any updated numbers on illegal immigrant gangsters and inmates in the city and county of Denver, I ask her. She says, and I quote, Where does this stuff come from?

It is impossible to know how many gang members in the city are illegal immigrants. Only upon arrest and incarceration, might we get some clue. In regard to the latter, Dulacki is able to provide some information.

Last year,the Denver city/county jail saw 46,884 "book-ins." A person can be booked-in more than once. I'd like to provide you with an unduplicated head count, but the city doesn't keep track that way. Dulacki can say that by year's end, 1,853 jail inmates had been reported to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as foreign-born. She also can say that from July to December, when the city started keeping track, ICE came for 410 inmates. (Caveat: ICE doesn't pick up every jailed illegal immigrant for various reasons — higher priorities, resources. It's been a sore spot.)

The Colorado Department of Corrections website provides a handy monthly inmate report. As of January, 22,910 people were incarcerated in the adult and juvenile systems. Of those, 1,783 were foreign born, and of those, 1,270 had an ICE hold on them. It was a typical month.

I tell you this knowing the argument isn't really about the numbers. It's not about the stats or the stories, which we can bend and twist and, if not bound by ethics, fictionalize, to lend credence to our own points of view. We are biased creatures, all too willing to accept that which reinforces our beliefs, and so a man from Arizona forwards the e-mail column with the words: "Somebody really did their homework on this one. Best on the subject to present date."

The numbers are a prop, arranged to support a larger argument and, in this case, it's a cultural one. "It's time to stand up for ... our way of life," the local man wrote back then. Culture always has been the subtext of immigration, legal and illegal, past and present.

Language, custom, tradition, the assimilation of smaller groups into larger, the dignity of the individual, the clash and contribution of various world views. What does it mean to be an American? Who is included, and who is excluded and why?

Big, hard and not-particularly-funny questions no amount of drummed-up statistics and wishful thinking will answer.

* * *

So the point is obvious. Be careful who you listen to and who you believe as the political wrangle intensifies. And remember this: If you read it on your computer, remember spam comes in the same package.

royexum@aol.com

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