By Danny Keating, Director of the Louisiana/Mississippi HVAC Insider

“Build a wall and crime will fall” is President Trump’s much-maligned slogan concerning border security as it relates to our southern boundary with Mexico. I personally feel it is criminal not to secure our borders. I blame our politicians and our past presidents, both democrat and republican. I feel it is time to pass new laws and to enforce our existing laws, but in the meantime let’s build a wall.

Regardless of what the mainstream media would like us to believe the slogan is based on very factual information. The information I’m sharing is a little dated, but I’m sure the problem hasn’t improved over the last few years and probably has worsened.

The Government Accountability Office released two 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 reports indicate that undoubtedly crime will fall after a wall is built since the numbers tell us that illegal aliens amount to a disproportionate number of federal prisoners.

The first report 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 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.

The 2011 GAO report wasn’t much different. It looked at 251,000 criminal aliens in federal, state, and local prisons and jails. Those aliens were arrested nearly 1.7 million times for close to three million criminal offenses. Sixty-eight percent of those in federal prison and 66 percent of those in state prisons were from Mexico. Their offenses ranged from homicide and kidnapping to drugs, burglary, and larceny.

Alarmingly, this only reflects the criminal histories of aliens who were in prison. This did not include all crimes committed by criminal aliens, otherwise the numbers would likely be higher because prosecutors often will agree to drop criminal charges against an illegal alien if they are assured that immigration authorities will deport the alien. Unfortunately, it seems that the illegal aliens often return to the U.S. after they are deported by immigration.

Remember, every crime committed by an illegal alien is one that would not have occurred if that alien wasn’t in the United States in the first place. And while we certainly want criminal illegals taken off the streets, the cost of each of their incarcerations is over $35,000 a year paid for by we the taxpayer. In my opinion we have a national emergency at the southern border and I’m very thankful that we have a President who is brave enough to address it.