In the debate, Trump kept demonizing immigrants
Afanatic has been defined as someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject. It’s a good description of President Donald Trump, who began his quest for the presidency stoking fear of foreigners and used this year’s final debate to keep doing it, as he has throughout the presidency.
Foreigners who come toAmerica with or without authorization are all viewed with hostility by this administration. It has diverted military funds to build Trump’s borderwall. It has separated thousands of foreign children fromparents who came without permission— and then failed to reunite hundreds of these families. It has cut refugee admissions by some 90% and legal immigration by half. It has declaredwar on “sanctuary cities.”
Fromthe beginning, he’s combined pitiless policies with venomous rhetoric. In announcing his candidacy in 2015, he said ofMexicans coming to theU.S.: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”
In Thursday’s debate, Trump again invoked that bloodcurdling specter. Under previous administrations, he claimed, “a murdererwould come in, a rapist would come in, a very bad personwould come in— wewould take their name, we have to release them into our country.”
His own Department ofHomeland Security, however, begs to differ. In 2018, it said that past enforcement practiceswere “highly efficient at repatriatingMexicans, convicted criminals and single adults who do not seek humanitarian relief”— including 97% of those with criminal records .
AnotherTrump obsession is sanctuary cities, which limit police cooperationwithU.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He hasmoved to cut off federal funds to such jurisdictions, including Chicago. InOctober, ICE launched raids in several of these places, netting 170 arrests. Trump even wanted to deny coronavirus relief money to states that have sanctuary cities.
Itwas a 2015 incident in San Francisco that candidateTrump exploited in his demonization of these policies: A womanwas killed by a bullet fired by an undocumentedMexican felonwho had been released fromjail, though a jury ruled the shooting an accident.
Hewould have us believe that sanctuary cities give a free pass to undocumented criminals, exposing residents to rampant villainy. But sanctuary cities don’t treat foreigners who commit crimes any better thanU.S. citizens. They merely refuse to serve as immigration agents for the federal government by holding arrestees after they are entitled to be released.
In that, they are respecting constitutional guarantees. In 2018, a federal court ruled that the LosAngeles County sheriff’s department’s practice of assisting ICE by “detaining individuals beyond their date for release violated the individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights.”
Nor is there any reason to believe sanctuary policies present a danger. A new study by Stanford political scientistDavidK. Hausman concludes that “sanctuary policies reduce deportations by one-third, but that those policies do not reduce deportations of people with violent criminal convictions” and have “no measurable effect on crime.”
His study echoes the findings of previous research. True, there are the occasional cases of undocumented foreigners who commit lurid crimes after being released fromcustody. But it’s not the Americanway to lock up a large number of peaceable folks to incapacitate a small number of dangerous ones. The dangerous ones are indeed small in number. In fact, their law-abiding habits put the rest of us to shame. Cato Institute researcher Alex Nowrasteh analyzed the voluminous data fromTexas and determined that “illegal immigrant conviction rates are about half those of native-born Americans.”
Trump and his supporters claim they don’t object to legal immigrants, only the other kind. But his administration has choked off entry to foreigners coming here through approved channels. Among themethods: blocking travel fromseveralMuslim-majority countries, imposingwealth tests, slowing down the processing of applications for permanent residency status and barring new skilled-worker visas for a wide variety of jobs.
But ifTrump is having hisway on immigration and satisfying theMAGA crowd, he’s losing the public. “Thirtyfour percent of Americans, up from 27% a year ago, would prefer to see immigration to theU.S. increased,” Gallup reported in July. “This is the highest support for expanding immigration Gallup has found in its trend since 1965.”
Those whowant to curtail immigration can revel in Trump’s efforts to seal off America fromthe flowof foreign arrivals that have enriched our economy and society fromthe beginning. But come ElectionDay, they may find he’s given their cause the kiss of death.