U.S. border policy fueled by ‘blood libel’-like lies, hatred
The speed of America’s moral descent under Donald Trump is breathtaking. In a matter of months we’ve gone from a nation that stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to a nation that tears children from their parents and puts them in cages.
What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.
And you know what this reminds me of ? The history of anti-Semitism, a tale of prejudice fueled by myths and hoaxes that ended in genocide.
First, let’s talk about modern U.S. immigration and how it compares to those sick fantasies.
There is a highly technical debate among economists about whether low-education immigrants exert a depressing effect on the wages of low-education native-born workers. This debate, however, is playing no role in Trump policies.
What these policies reflect, instead, is a vision of “American carnage,” of big cities overrun by violent immigrants. And this vision bears no relationship to reality.
For one thing, despite a small uptick since 2014, violent crime in America is actually at historical lows, with the homicide rate back to where it was in the early 1960s.
True, if we look across America there is a correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of unauthorized immigrants — a negative correlation. That is, places with a lot of immigrants, legal and unauthorized, tend to have exceptionally low crime rates. The poster child for this tale of un-carnage is the biggest city of them all: New York, where more than a third of the population is foreign-born, probably including around half a million unauthorized immigrants — and crime has fallen to levels not seen since the 1950s.
Trump himself is, of course, a wealthy New Yorker, and a lot of the funding for anti-immigrant groups comes from foundations controlled by right-wing billionaires.
I don’t know what drives such people — but we’ve seen this movie before, in the history of anti-Semitism.
The thing about anti-Semitism is that it was never about anything Jews actually did. It was always about lurid myths, often based on deliberate fabrications, that were spread to engender hatred.
For example, for centuries people repeated the “blood libel” — the claim that Jews sacrificed Christian babies as part of the Passover ritual. In the early part of the 20th century there was wide dissemination of “The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” a supposed plan for Jewish world domination probably forged by the Russian secret police.
In any case, the important thing to understand is that the atrocities our nation is now committing at the border don’t represent an overreaction or poorly implemented response to some actual problem that needs solving. There is no immigration crisis; there is no crisis of immigrant crime.
No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred is, in effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity.