Fellow Blog Board contributor Jeralyn Merritt has made the case that “undocumented residents” are unfairly maligned and stereotyped by conservatives because most illegal immigrants are honest, law-abiding people.

That is a myth.

The reality of life as an illegal immigrant is that you lie all the time. You lie to your boss, to your landlord, to medical care providers, to school administrators, to your friends and your neighbors. Illegal immigrants routinely break all sorts of laws just to survive on a day-to-day basis: filing false information on government forms, on a lease, on cell phone or cable TV contracts, operating a vehicle without a driver’s license, various forms of insurance fraud and so on.

I have quite a few friends who are illegal immigrants and it breaks my heart to see them struggle this way in order to make a life for them and their family. If the opportunity arose, I would not hesitate to sponsor any of them for citizenship. My empathy for them as individuals, however, has no bearing on the question of whether there is a growing problem with criminal aliens in the United States.

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We might even have a healthy debate about that if apologists for illegal immigrants would stop deriding those who disagree with them as heartless, immigrant-bashing, racist, xenophobic, demagogues and an even better one if these same apologists would stop confusing terms like non-citizen, immigrant, illegal alien and criminal alien.

The INS defines non-citizen as including immigrants who are granted legal permanent residence, refugees and asylees and non-immigrants including tourists, students, foreigners working in the U.S., and Mexican and Canadian citizens with Border Crossing Cards. As Merritt notes, the vast majority of noncitizens legally admitted to the U.S. are non-immigrants.

INS assigns a status to all noncitizens. Legal aliens are noncitizens who enter the U.S. after inspection and have not violated the terms of their admission. Illegal aliens are noncitizens who enter the U.S. without presenting themselves for inspection or who legally enter the U.S. and subsequently violate a condition of their visa, such as overstaying the visa or committing a crime.

Criminal aliens are noncitizens who have been convicted of certain felonies like murder, rape, drug trafficking, and certain firearms or national security offenses. Criminal aliens are deportable once criminal proceedings against them have been terminated or after they have completed serving their sentence.

Not all noncitizens are immigrants, not all immigrants are illegal aliens and not all illegal aliens are criminal aliens.

The debate in this country is not about tourists, foreign students or those crossing the border legally from Mexico or Canada. The issue for most Americans is illegal aliens and a related subset of noncitizens — criminal aliens.

In this light, Merritt’s argument can be seen as a polemic masquerading as analysis. After assuring us there is no “immigrant crime wave,” she engages in various quantitative contortions to justify a claim that does not bear up under even the most cursory scrutiny. She relies on dubious proxy data to draw unfounded conclusions in order to justify a premise that has no bearing on the national debate — “there is no immigrant crime wave.”

A review of the Bureau of Justice Statistics Report cited by Merritt, “Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006”, shows no break-out of non-citizen data by those who were, before their conviction, in the country legally or illegally.

Paige Harrison, co-author of the report, confirms there is no such data for the simple reason that BOJ does not have it. The same data set does, however, provide a reliable, direct metric by which to measure any increase or decrease in crime by criminal aliens, a metric that Merritt ignores.

According to the BOJ, the number of noncitizens incarcerated in federal prisons was 4,088 in 1984 and stood at 34,422 in 2004. As Merritt correctly points out, that 2004 figure has since declined to 33,701 in 2006 but that still leaves an 800 percent increase in the number of criminal aliens locked up in federal prisons.

A number made more startling when one considers there are roughly twice that number incarcerated in state prisons and local jails. Crime wave? More like crime Tsunami.

Robert Cox is a member of The Examiner’s Board of Bloggers and is founder and president of the Media Bloggers Association.