Even if it were true that illegal aliens commit crimes, including murder, at rates lower than American citizens, that would be irrelevant. The murder rate for illegal aliens should be zero because none of them should be here and the indisputable fact is that Jamiel Shaw Jr., Kate Steinle, and Mollie Tibbetts would be alive today if the illegal aliens who slew them were still staring at the other side of a border wall liberals refuse to build.

But it is not true and it is a myth perpetrated by those who want to promote the open borders agenda:

According to a recent Associated Press article, “multiple studies have concluded that immigrants are less likely to commit crime than native-born U.S. citizens.” But the issue isn’t non-citizens who are in this country legally, and who must abide by the law to avoid having their visas revoked or their application for citizenship refused. The real issue is the crimes committed by illegal aliens. And in that context, the claim is quite misleading, because the “multiple studies” on crimes committed by “immigrants” — including a 2014 study by a professor from the University of Massachusetts, which is the only one cited in the article — combine the crime rates of both citizens and non-citizens, legal and illegal…

These claims overlook disturbing actual data on crimes committed by criminal aliens. For example, the Government Accountability Office released two unsettling reports in 2005 on criminal aliens who are in prison for committing crimes in the United States, and issued an updated report in 2011.

The first report (GAO-05-337R) found that criminal aliens (both legal and illegal) make up 27 percent of all federal prisoners. Yet according to the Center for Immigration Studies, non-citizens are only about nine percent of the nation’s adult population. Thus, judging by the numbers in federal prisons alone, non-citizens commit federal crimes at three times the rate of citizens.

The findings in the second report (GAO-05-646R) are even more disturbing. This report looked at the criminal histories of 55,322 aliens that “entered the country illegally and were still illegally in the country at the time of their incarceration in federal or state prison or local jail during fiscal year 2003.” Those 55,322 illegal aliens had been arrested 459,614 times, an average of 8.3 arrests per illegal alien, and had committed almost 700,000 criminal offenses, an average of roughly 12.7 offenses per illegal alien.

Needless to say, all of these crimes would have been off the books had the illegal aliens committing them not been here. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, appeared with Tucker Carlson on Fox News and explained that despite libs cherry-picking their data, the fact remains illegals commit heinous crimes at a higher and astounding rate:

There’s something called the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program [SCAAP] and you can extrapolate from that and get pretty reliable data. Now Alex [Nowrasteh] is very knowledgeable; that’s why it’s puzzling that he won’t acknowledge the overwhelming amount of data that shows that illegal aliens not only commit more crimes at a higher rate, that is than lawful residents, but more serious crimes at a far higher rate than lawful residents. And we’re not talking about a little bit; he conveniently mentioned Texas to claim that the homicide rates among illegal aliens is 44 percent lower than that for lawful residents. He chose the one state where it is true that the homicide rate is lower for illegal aliens by 15 percent not 44 percent, but if you look at every of their (other) state it’s significant how much more — not just the homicide rate, but every other serious crime: rape, aggravated assault, you name it — so much more.

For example, in New York 27 percent of incarcerated illegal aliens are incarcerated for murder, not jaywalking. We did a study, Carissa Mulder and I did a study with respect to five states, five of the largest states, to see how many illegal aliens were incarcerated for homicide — Texas, New York, Florida, California and Arizona — 5,400 legal aliens are incarcerated for homicide. That’s just homicide.

John Lott did probably the most methodologically rigorous and comprehensive examination of this by using Arizona Department of Corrections data, and he went over a 30-year period. This was exhaustive, and this is what he does — he’s a scholar — and what he showed is that illegal aliens don’t just commit more crime or more serious crimes by say, 5 percent more or 10 percent more than awful residents, but by 250 percent more.

Researcher John Lott, of the Crime Prevention Center, has produced shocking data of how illegal alien criminals are ravaging the state of Arizona and what they might be doing nationally:

Using newly released detailed data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017, we are able to separate non-U.S. citizens by whether they are illegal or legal residents. Unlike other studies, these data do not rely on self-reporting of criminal backgrounds. Undocumented immigrants are at least 142% more likely to be convicted of a crime than other Arizonans. They also tend to commit more serious crimes and serve 10.5% longer sentences, more likely to be classified as dangerous, and 45% more likely to be gang members than U.S. citizens…

While undocumented immigrants from 15 to 35 years of age make up slightly over two percent of the Arizona population, they make up about eight percent of the prison population. Even after adjusting for the fact that young people commit crime at higher rates, young undocumented immigrants commit crime at twice the rate of young U.S. citizens. These undocumented immigrants also tend to commit more serious crimes.

If undocumented immigrants committed crime nationally as they do in Arizona, in 2016 they would have been responsible for over 1,000 more murders, 5,200 rapes, 8,900 robberies, 25,300 aggravated assaults, and 26,900 burglaries.

None of this matters to liberal advocates of open borders and sanctuary cities. The likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and CNN’s Chris Cuomo mock the deaths of Mollie Tibbetts and many others like her when they worry more about the temporary separation of illegal border crossers and their children. Death is the ultimate separator.

According to Warren, she of the so-called “party of compassion”, she is sorry Mollie is dead, but we should not let us be distracted from the plight of crying children at border crossing centers:

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren said Wednesday she’s “sorry” Mollie Tibbetts is dead, but urged her family and friends to remember to focus on the “real problems” at the border, where parents are being temporarily separated from their children.

An illegal immigrant has been charged with murdering Tibbetts, a 20-year-old University of Iowa student recently found dead in a cornfield. Republicans have called for a stronger immigration system that might have prevented this crime.

After offering her condolences to the Tibbetts family, who will never be reunited with their daughter again, Warren immediately pivoted to how said it is that moms at the border who have willfully broken the law are being temporarily separated from their babies.

Compare that tenderness to the monstrous rhetoric of Trump supporters and border security advocates who want to build a wall and enhance border security to keep our children from being murdered by illegal aliens.

Cuomo was particularly insensitive to Tibbetts murder by claiming that condemnations of her murder by border security and border wall supporters an illegal aliens was politicizing her tragedy:

“Demonizing people because of their decision to take a shortcut and get here the easy way. And that is what causes illegal entrants most of the time. I wonder if these sympathizers would be as full throated about these tragedies if the killers were white citizens, if the victims were not young white women. If that were the case, would we see a video like this from Trump today?”

Calling attention to the killing of our children by illegal aliens is a description of a real problem. Trump is not demonizing illegal aliens by calling attention to the killers that lurk among them or proposing a solution in the form of a wall and enhanced border security. As for his insensitive and incorrect remark about “young white women”, Cuomo should talk to the father of Jamiel Shaw Jr., the young African-American student athlete murdered by an illegal alien in the sanctuary city of Los Angeles or other minorities in these sanctuary cities who fall victim to gangs like MS-13.

Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts are not isolated cases. On Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2015, Jamiel Shaw Sr. testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee  on how his son, Jamiel Shaw, Jr., was killed by an illegal alien in 2008 harbored by the sanctuary city of Los Angeles

Shaw was a Los Angeles high school star dreaming of a good life ahead when he was gunned down on March 2, 2008, while walking home. He was picked at random, police said, possibly as part of a gang loyalty test for the illegal alien who shot him.

Charged with the crime was Pedro Espinoza, who’d been released just hours earlier from Los Angeles County Jail where he spent four months for brandishing a firearm and resisting arrest. Espinoza is an illegal alien.

Shaw Sr. warned of the consequences of sanctuary cities harboring criminal illegal aliens and not deporting them, of not enforcing existing immigration laws, and of open borders:

“My son, Jamiel Shaw II, was murdered while walking on his own street, three houses down from his home. An illegal alien on his first gun charge was visiting a neighbor when my son was coming home,” Shaw testified. “He shot my son in the stomach and then in the head, killing him.”

Shaw then asked an obvious question: “Do black lives really matter? Or does it matter only if you are shot by a white person or white policeman?”

All lives matter. So did the life of the he son of Donald Rosenberg, who would be alive today if he hadn’t in 2010 been run down while riding on his motorcycle by an illegal alien who made an illegal left turn and then ran over him three times as he tried to flee the scene. Rosenberg, who describes himself as a “lifelong, very liberal Democrat” calculated that his son was among 3,000 Americans killed by illegal aliens in car crashes in 2010. In a letter quoted by the Washington Times that he wrote to President Obama, Rosenberg said:

“My son and all of the others are considered collateral damage in the quest for votes and campaign contributions,” he wrote. “Illegal immigration is not a victimless crime.”

Indeed, it is not, and the question asked by many families like, the Shaws, the Steinles, the Tibbetts and the Rosenbergs is — wasn’t America supposed to be our sanctuary?

Liberals like to support programs using the plea that if it saves just one life it is worth it. If it saves just one life, the wall is worth building.

Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications.