Ron Unz over at American Conservative has been investigating the question: How criminal are Hispanics? After a formidable number-crunching exercise he concludes.

The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.

It looks to me like an impressive piece of work, though I’ll confess I feel the same about this issue as I do about global warming, viz. Give me a year and $100,000 and I’ll crunch the numbers myself & give you a dispositive result. Too many variables, too many murky areas, too many regional oddities to untangle. (See for example the “Race” logged here for Messrs. Santiago, Lopez, Gutierrez, Martinez-Estrada, Flores, Ramirez-Lopez, Salas-Garcia, and Sanchez-Gonzales.) Short of that, I don’t feel an honest person can do much but make throat-clearing noises and say: “Well, it looks like . . .

It’s still an impressive analysis, and anyone who wants to refute it needs to come up with something at least as well-argued, data-respecting and systematic as Ron’s piece. Data talks, b-s walks in my book. And there is something that needs explaining. Why do such heavily Hispanic cities as Santa Ana and El Paso record crime rates below the white urban average?

How any of this impinges on the National Question is an orthogonal issue. Not at all, from a Huntingtonian point of view. (Which is, approximately: There are 20 Hispanic nations in our hemisphere. Why do we need another one? Why is one Anglo-American nation one too many?)

And I wish Ron hadn’t given his piece the same title as a recent book by sputtering ethno-shill Geraldo Rivera. Ron — and Razib, who collaborated in the number crunching — have done a fine piece here, that will be hard work to refute. It’s a shame his title puts us in mind of another guy’s emotional (and, on a quick browse, wellnigh data-free) ethnocentric blathering.