Duane wrote:
yes, one can use statistics (selectively) to make any argument one desired. The stats thrown out here are the crime rate stats, and that immigrants have a lower crime rate than citizens, so more immigrants mean lower crime rate and that is good. But, since immigrants do commit some crimes, I could argue more immigrants means more crimes, and that is bad.
It's not as simple as your last sentence seems. Would an immigrant have committed a crime anywhere, or only in America? If you think the immigrant would only commit a crime in America then you are right. But if, as seems more likely, an immigrant would have committed a crime in his home country, then stopping immigration only means preventing crimes occurring in America.
On using statistics selectively, can you offer any argument why people should be concerned with number of crimes rather than crime rates? Or more generally, why people should care more about the total amount of something in a population rather than the amount per person?
If I compared the GDP (or other measure of income or wealth) of Wyoming with Africa and found Africa's was higher, would you say observing that GDP per capita was higher in Wyoming was arguing selectively?