The Independent today reported that The Trump administration will now be publishing a weekly report on crimes committed by immigrants.
In the dusty aftermath of a despicable campaign, this is actually the first concrete action taken by the new administration to target a vulnerable minority for demonization and dehumanization in the eyes of the American public. We must respond to this. If the bully is not hit back and hit back hard, this assault on the weak will only explode.
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of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.” A. LINCOLN
Fred Rich LaRiccia
We need to tell this to anyone who supports this crap.
But using the data we have, it seems impossible to responsibly claim that those immigrants are more likely to commit crimes than their American-born neighbors.
Don’t trust me? How about the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes any kind of plan to grant legal status to undocumented immigrants and regularly testifies in Congress against them.
“There’s no evidence that immigrants are either more or less likely to commit crimes than anyone else in the population,” Janice Kephart, a CIS researcher, said last week on the PBS NewsHour.
.. in the least. The policy is wrong, in and of itself. It doesn’t matter if immigrants did commit violent crimes far in excess of native-borns. That would be a problem of policing and not of immigrants. The fact that native-borns are more violent doesn’t bother them at all. It’s the immigrant part that bothers them.
You’re taking the debate on their terms. Don’t do that.
I’m correcting it.
Example:
Trump Supporter: Okay, you want to know what’s Trump done that I agree with? He is going to publish a daily report of the crimes that illegals commit.
Me: Why is that important?
Trump Supporter: It’s important because it proves why we need to build a wall!
Me: Are you aware that illegal immigration is currently at a 40 year low AND we know that those who do come here are no more prone to violent crime than the people who live next door. So now, do you really think that’s a good way to spend $15 Billion Dollars? I thought you were concerned about our nation’s growing debt?
Facts matter little to these voters. Feelings do. Find a way to get them to care about these immigrants as fellow human beings and tug at their heart strings. Focus on the families getting divided or all the hard work they do and tell it in anecdotes. Data goes in one ear and out the other.
I agree, feelings can overcome facts. They feel that these people are criminals, stealing from them and taking their jobs. They feel that way because Trump and Fox and Breitbart tell them so. What do we tell them besides “Trump and Fox” are wrong?
You’re accepting the premise. So if and when violence among immigrants does, however briefly and/or marginally, rise higher than that of native borns, (which could do for a variety of reasons none of which have anything to do with the immigrants themselves) your ‘correction’ will be thrown back in your face and they will double-down on the policy because you validated the pretext.
The policy is wrong. It’s that simple. It’s not wrong because the underlying assumption of greater proclivity to violence is wrong… they only make that assumption to justify the policy… Arguing on those terms is just refusing to say, outright, that the policy is wrong.
They do not shield undocumented immigrants from prosecution for crimes they have allegedly committed themselves, but protect them from having legitimate interaction with authorities, such as reporting the crime of another, from resulting in their own deportation, right?
There’s some variation, but generally it simply means that the local authorities decline to act as arms of the federal government on this matter for sundry reasons, sometimes merely budgetary. Even here in Massachusetts, for a while some courts and some counties were sua sponte contacting ICE, and reporting that an individual was on custody after delving into that Individual’s immigration status.
Some of it for a period had to do with incipient implementation of the Safe Communities federal-state program, which targeted those accused of even minor crimes, if they could not produce documentation- when such federal documentation has not traditionally been required of local defendants.
The right distorts all of this wherever they can find sensational criminal cases involving undocumented persons.
I think that the real issue here is more about government propaganda and the demonization and smearing of the broader undocumented community, rather than the specifics. It is chilling to have the White House itself engaging in this kind of propagandistic use of statistics or individual stories to target a vulnerable and largely unpopular minority group because it smacks eerily of the publication of catalogs of supposed crimes by Jews in the early days of the Third Reich.
It has Steve Bannon written all over it.