Dear Mexican: I’ve been on sex-offender registry websites a couple of times, and it seems there are a lot of names ending with -ez. Is there an elevated rate of sexual deviancy amongst Mexicans? If so, why?
—El Güero Guapisimo
Dear Readers: This is the first time in ¡Ask a Mexican! history I’ve ever changed an answer, but only because the situation deserves since “Mexicans-are-rapists” is the new black right now. I answered the above pregunta in 2007 this way:
Methinks you doth look for brownies too much. But I don’t blame you. Turn on the television and radio, and you’re likely to hear anti-immigrant pendejos screech about how Mexicans will rape you while stealing your job and playing banda music really loud. You’ll probably hear them invoke the work of Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin. Her 2006 paper “The Dark Side of Illegal Immigration: Nearly One Million Sex Crimes Committed by Illegal Immigrants in the United States” came to some startling conclusions, including that there are 240,000 illegal-immigrant sex offenders in this country—and that 93 of these cretins enter this country daily. Know-nothing politicians and even the House Homeland Security Committee’s Subcommittee on Investigations have cited Schurman-Kauflin’s paper in arguing against amnesty.
She based her findings on a 2005 Government Accountability Office (GAO) survey that showed 2 percent of illegals in federal, local or state prisons had committed a sex crime. She then applied that percentage to the illegal-immigrant population at large—voila! Instant endemic perversity! But this statistical sleight-of-hand withers by employing the very stats she uses. GAO data for 2003 (the most recent year available) showed about 308,000 criminal aliens (legal as well as illegal immigrants) were in American prisons; they constitute about 3 percent of the nation’s 12 million illegal immigrants. If only 2 percent of incarcerated illegals committed a sex crime, then it’s intellectually misleading to arrive at the 240,000 figure for all illegals, ¿qué no?
For the Mexican, a more telling number is the percentage of criminals arrested for sex crimes. So, let’s compare apples to manzanas: In 2003, gabachos incarcerated for such crimes represented about 18 percent of all gabacho inmates in state prisons; perverted Hispanics, conversely, made up just 11 percent (strangely enough, the U.S. Department of Justice doesn’t keep the same statistics for federal prisons). According to this comparison, gabachos are more likely as a group to sexually assault you than Mexicans—but betcha you won’t hear Lou Dobbs repeat that factoid ad nauseam.
Now, the update, which I’m pirating from my recent Politico article on the same subject: A 2011 U.S. Government Accountability Office study “Criminal Alien Statistics: Information on Incarcerations, Arrests and Costs” found that of the three million arrests of immigrants, legal or not, examined by investigators, only two percent were for sex offenses—two percent too many, but hardly an epidemic. It didn’t break down the ethnicity or legal status of the offenders, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey breaks down such stats by victims. For 2013 (the most recent year available), it shows that whites accounted for 71 percent of all sexual assaults documented (above their total percentage of 63 percent of the U.S. population), while Latinos accounted for 9 percent, far below their total percentage of 17 percent. And as a percentage of all “serious violent victimizations,” sexual assaults represent 11 percent of the violent crimes against Latinos. For gabachos? 18 percent. The BJS also noted that for the period from 2005-2010 about 66 percent of sexual assualt victims knew their perp, and that whites had strangers commit violent victimizations against them at a rate of 9.2 per 1,000 people, compared to 9.8 per 1,000 for Latinos—so much for the notion of an army of faceless Mexicans stalking their fair-skinned prey.
For those who don’t comprende: white American citizens are far more rape-y than Mexicans can ever hope to become. So when are gabachos going to jump on that pandemic?
Ask the Mexican at themexican@askamexican.net. be his fan on Facebook. follow him on Twitter @gustavoarellano or follow him on Instagram @gustavo_arellano!
