During his current visit to the U.S.-Mexico border, 6th District GOP Rep. Peter Roskam blasted our nation's border controls, telling district residents via a "tele-town hall" yesterday that Illinois is "becoming a magnet for illegal immigration." And on WLS' Don Wade & Roma today, Roskam warned listeners about the character of people crossing the border illegally.

Listen here:

Internal mp3

ROSKAM: The sobering piece to me was the number of illegals who are trying to come in here who -- they’re not economic refugees, right? There is a high percentage of folks who just want to come over to work. You and I know that. But there is a very significant proportion of these folks who are criminals, dangerous criminals, who are coming into the state.

It seems that Roskam has been spending a bit too much time listening to cable news blowhards Bill O'Reilly and Lou Dobbs. Indeed, a recent Media Matters study -- titled "Fear and Loathing in Prime Time" -- found that Dobbs and O'Reilly discussed the alleged connection between crime and illegal immigration 94 and 66 times, respectively, during their 2007 broadcasts.

But that connection is fraught to say the least. Most social scientists and criminologists agree that there is virtually no evidence indicating that undocumented immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than American citizens.

Instructive is the work of Robert Samson, chairman of the Sociology Department at Harvard University. In research that spans a decade, Samson found that first-generation Chicago immigrants are 45 percent less likely than third-generation immigrants to commit violence and are also less likely to be imprisoned than native-borns relative to their population size. Samson told Salon last year that "illegal aliens are disproportionately less likely to be involved in many acts of deviance, crime, drunk driving, any number of things that sort of imperil our well-being." Samson goes on to give Salon several reasons why he thinks this is the case:

One is just a simple selection factor, as we would call it in the academic literature. What that means is that the pool of people that are coming into the country are selected on certain characteristics, such as wanting to get ahead in the United States, and that's associated with working hard, keeping out of trouble, keeping their heads down. [...]

Secondly, and related to it, there's less incentive to commit crime, and greater sanctions, because of course one can be deported, and one doesn't want to draw attention to oneself.

Third, I think there's a family structure relationship here, in that the immigrants, at least in our data, are much more likely to be in intact families. In Chicago, for example, the Mexican-Americans are more likely to be married even than whites, and family structure is related to the risk of certain outcomes among offspring in our data and [that of other researchers]. So the fact that there are more intact families is, I think, part of the explanation, which of course also points out an irony in the anti-immigrant onslaught from the far right.

If he keeps it up, we may have to make examples of Roskam's fearmongering a recurring feature here at Progress Illinois ...