You are right, "many" are committing crimes but "many" is relative. What entails many...1...1,000,000?
Apparently there is not much of an epidemic of criminal activity, outside of the criminal act of illegally crossing into the U.S. These numbers are a bit old but the numbers are likely about the same today as they were then:
"Adult illegal aliens represented 3.1 percent of the total adult population of the country in 2003. By comparison, the illegal alien prison population represented a bit more than 4.54 percent of the overall prison population.”
First off, the second half of the statement is not correct and their own study reveals that, but let’s assume that these figures are correct. According to that quote, illegal immigrants are incarcerated a rate that is 1.1 percent higher than their population, which means that the incarceration rate among illegal aliens are extremely low as Rivera suggested to O’Reilly. For example, compare that to Black Americans who represent about 20 percent of the California population and 31.4 percent of the prison population. Additionally Blacks represent about 12 percent of the US population but an alarming 49 percent of the total U.S. prison population (Blumstein, 1993; Tonroy, 1995; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1996).
Further more, this low incarceration rate for illegal immigrants is based on an estimate of 7 million adult illegal immigrants in the US in 2000. If this figure is an underestimate, as many suggest, then the illegal immigrant incarceration rate would drop from the 4.54 percent percentage cited in the report.
The conclusion that illegal immigrants are incarcerated at a higher rate than their population, according to the FAIR study, compares the illegal immigrant adult population to not the illegal immigrant prison population but to the number of days that illegal aliens spent in prison compared the total number of days that all inmates spent in prison. This is flawed, because those total days that illegal aliens spent in prison include repeat offenders. I have never read a scientific study in a peer reviewed journal that would compare a population (7 million illegal aliens) to days spent (27 million) and conclude anything of merit from that comparison, but this is the article that Elder cited and this is why he is factually incorrect about what Rivera said on O’Reilly’s show. Even using these flawed statistics, the illegal immigrant population is incarcerated at a low rate compared to their share of the population, and if the FAIR researchers determined a way to extract the repeat offenders from that figure, that rate would be more accurate (could be higher or lower).<" http://www.topix.com/forum/state/ca/TEQQK34APT5OULCUD
I have no valid counterpoints to your statements. Numbers are not tracked adequately to state anything definitive on legal/illegal incarceration. I have seen those same numbers you are stating. I have how ever seen numbers that are reverse of what is above. Some indicating that 30% of those in jail are Latino decent and half of those are illegals. But again I wouldn't trust those estimates either.