The e-mail that popped into my inbox started with an insult and included an attachment full of "facts."
After calling me a "crybaby" for writing a sympathetic story about Mexican immigrants, the sender insisted I read a series of statistics on the effects of illegal immigration on Los Angeles and California. Hospitals, law enforcement and other public services, he said, are being overwhelmed.
At first, because of the sender's tone, I ignored the attachment. Then it arrived again, this time forwarded by a friendly reader. He didn't believe the e-mail, he said, but wanted me to know that three friends had sent it to him. And 10 of its facts were said to have originated in this newspaper.
I started reading the chain letter, which carried the title "Just One State." It asked me to forward its message to at least two other people. "If this doesn't open your eyes," it declared, "nothing will."
I'm all in favor of having my eyes opened -- and then making sure my eyes don't deceive me. So I took the 10 "stats" and focused a little light on them. I waded deep into The Times' archive with the help of our librarian Scott Wilson, and made a few phone calls too.
What did I find? A stew made up for the most part of meaty exaggerations and spicy conjecture, mixed in with some giblets of truth. Two of the "stats" are the musings of a conservative op-ed writer. Another takes its information from a government "report" that is, in fact, a work of fiction.
The last two items on the list are the most accurate -- but they reveal more about the prejudices and fears of the people passing the list along than they do about the supposed effect of "illegals."
Here they are, from 1 to 10:
1. "40% of all workers in L.A. County are working for cash and not paying taxes. . . . This is because they are predominantly illegal immigrants working without a green card."
The source of this information seems to be a 2005 study by the Economic Roundtable on the informal economy in Los Angeles County. Its findings were reported in The Times and other papers.
But the chain-mail's author more than doubled the figures in that study, which estimated that 15% of the county workforce was outside the regulated economy in 2004. Illegal immigrants getting paid in cash, it said, probably made up about 9% of the workforce.
A later Economic Roundtable report, by the way, credited immigrants with keeping the local economy from shrinking in the 1990s.
