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murders received little attention from pundits outside of the Connecticut area. And no one much cared about the Newark incident either, until it was later revealed that Carranza was an illegal alien from Peru, at which point talk radio and cable news outlets nationwide could talk of little else. Immigrant foes presented Carranza as a typical Latino illegal alien, and his status dominated the discussion. What could have been a conversation about the inadequacies of our criminal justice system instead turned into a prolonged session of immigrant bashing.

Bill O’Reilly, who checks the immigration status of drunk drivers before deciding whether to discuss them on the air, said Newark had brought this tragedy on itself because the city had not deputized its police officers as immigration agents. Never mind that Newark’s mayor, Cory Booker, campaigned for office on crime prevention. He is one of the sharpest urban leaders in the country, part of a small band of young black politicians who aren’t afraid to challenge liberal orthodoxy on everything from taxes to school reform to crime. To O’Reilly, however, Booker was no better than his corrupt predecessor, Sharpe James. The commentator said Booker lacked “the will to protect people from crime and terrorism,” and that “his city continues to allow criminal illegal aliens to commit crimes.”

Others piled on. Referencing Carranza, Newt Gingrich said the “war here at home” against illegal aliens is “even more deadly than the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Tom Tancredo even paid a visit to Newark to exploit the tragedy. He, too, fingered Booker and other officials as complicit in the murders because they had declared Newark a “sanctuary city” for illegals. “Their actions have directly contributed to the deaths of three promising young American kids,” said Tancredo, standing on the steps of city hall.

So-called sanctuary policies adopted by dozens of major cities, including Los Angeles and New York, discourage municipal workers from assessing the immigration status of people using city services and then passing it on to federal immigration authorities. But in Newark, as elsewhere, the police are exempted from the sanctuary provisions during criminal investigations. That minor detail was omitted by O’Reilly, Gingrich, Tancredo, and others as they rushed to milk the situation for a few divisive sound bites. So was the fact that many big-city police departments don’t want to be responsible for enforcing federal immigration laws because they say it makes them less effective at their day jobs. How so? People in immigrant communities who view the local police as deportation agents are less likely to report crimes and assist in investigations, which tends to make a city less safe.

WHO’S DRIVING U.S. CRIME RATES?

But using Carranza as a poster child for illegal immigration isn’t merely opportunistic. It’s also a gross distortion of reality, albeit a common one. One poll found that nearly 75 percent of Americans perceive a causal link between increased immigration and increased crime, which is even higher than the 60 percent who mistakenly believe that immigrants displace American workers. Certainly, Hollywood abets the misperception with popular fare like The Godfather, Scarface, and The Sopranos. Media reports on Colombian cocaine cartels and Salvadoran gangs also might lead people to believe that immigrants are responsible for higher crime rates. And then there’s the fact that so many of today’s newcomers share the demographic characteristics of native-born criminals: male Latinos with low-average levels of education and low-average wages. The assumption, which is shared by many politicians and public policy makers, is that the immigrants who fit this profile must be adversely affecting crime rates. Even immigrant-friendly George W. Bush has stated that “illegal immigration . . . brings crime to our communities.”

Small wonder, then, that Congress’s failure to overhaul immigration laws has led states to enact their own policies. In the first six months of 2007, more than 1,400 measures