Three Years Ago, Immigrant-bashers Were Claiming 'Illegal Aliens' Killed 9,000 People A Year. Now They Claim 2,200. Eh?

[Cross-posted at Crooks and Liars.]

Have you noticed how the people who love to bash "illegal immigrants" by associating them with things like disease and crime -- nativists like Lou Dobbs, or that fellow Ed Kowalski of "9/11 Families for a Secure America", who went on Fox & Friends last week to claim that Arizonans faced an ungodly wave of violent crime at the hands of those dirty illegal immigrants -- never really seem to have a good grasp of numbers?

Remember, here's what he told Gretchen Carlson:

Carlson: According to you, politicians seem to be more concerned about the illegals' rights than the rights of the Americans, some of whom end up dead.

Kowalski: That's correct, that's correct. As best as we can estimate, 2,200 Americans a year are murdered by criminal illegal aliens. That number is staggering.

Of course, as we (and Media Matters) pointed out, that number was drawn from a bizarre magazine article whose methodology was anything but scientific or even logical, let alone ethical. It wasn't quite extracted whole from Kowalski's butt, but from some similar orifice.

Now watch the video above. It was taken on September 1, 2007, on the steps of the state Capitol in Harrisburg, PA, at a "Voice of the People USA" rally. Both organizations appear to be primarily dedicated to bashing immigrants as a supposed wellspring of a wave of crime -- even though statistics, as we've pointed out, substantively demonstrate that this is simply untrue.

But back then, after Kowalski had warmed the crowd up with his own personal tale, he proclaimed:

Kowalski: Twenty-five Americans on average a day are killed by illegal aliens. Folks, I'm gonna ask you to do the math. That works out to over 9,000 deaths per year.

Hmmm. So, according to Ed Kowalski, only three years ago, their "best estimate" was that 9,000 people were being killed by "illegal aliens". And in three years' time, that's now plummeted dramatically to 2,158! Wow! That's a dramatic shift, dontcha think?

'Course, you really don't want to ask Ed where he gets all these figures. He may just drop his trousers, turn around and show you.