Colorado Media Matters has been doing an excellent job of debunking the local media’s hyperbolic and inaccurate claims about immigrants.

I have an op-ed in today’s Washington Examiner newspaper…There is No Immigrant Crime Wave.

Recently, conservative talk show hosts and politicians anxious to get themselves elected have been using random, unrelated high-profile crimes to mislead the public, generating fear and hysteria.

Using government statistics that show just 4 percent of our 2.25 million federal and state inmate population are non-citizens and that young foreign-born men are five times less likely to be incarcerated than those born in the U.S., I argue:

Immigration does not breed crime. Our prisons are not overflowing because of crimes by the undocumented. They are overflowing because of our failed criminal justice policies and over reliance on incarceration versus treatment and rehabilitation with respect to our nonviolent homegrown offenders.

There is nothing wrong with having a debate about immigration. But it is deplorable to falsely stereotype and malign millions of law-abiding people because of one’s desire for a particular outcome in that debate.

Hope you’ll read the whole thing. It will make the xenophobic anti-immigrants out there see red.