At yesterday’s political rally speech in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump, while rambling from one topic to the next, returned over and over to immigration. It was immigrants, he said, who cause America’s problems. It was the Democratic Party’s love of immigrants, he said, that disqualifies them for public office. Us versus them. A simple formula: immigrants are bad, while Americans are good.
Conservative speakers have long blamed their own problems and mistakes on someone else. Yes, the United States has crime. In real life, as we will see later, immigrants do not cause our crime problem. Unfortunately, if native-born Americans take responsibility for our society’s own failings, they might want to make changes. Conservatives don’t want to change. That’s what makes them conservative. That, briefly, is why Donald Trump wants to blame immigrants for the United States’ problems. His rally audience seemed happy to accept that explanation, which appealed to their bigotry. Trump’s explanation absolved his audience from accepting responsibility for their own failings. It’s a simple rhetorical trick. Let’s look at how Trump did it.
Trump Said That Immigrants Cause Crime
Indeed, Trump rambled back and forth about immigration and crime throughout his speech. Let’s start by unpacking this passage:
“The radical Democrat Congresses turned our country into one giant sanctuary for serious criminal aliens. We protect all of the criminals; we don’t protect our own people. In fact, they raid our people. And the Republican Party. We believe our country should be a sanctuary for law abiding citizens who love America. If we’re going to make America great again, our first [task] is to make America safe again. We have to have a safe country.”
Now, for an American leader to attack immigrants creates a paradox. The United States is mostly a nation of immigrants. My maternal grandparents were Eastern European immigrants. As Trump commented, many Democrats want to offer sanctuary to refugees. In Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric, however, immigrants are just criminals: “one giant sanctuary for serious criminal aliens.”
In fact, consistent with standard right-wing themes, Trump argued that immigrants—criminals, in his view—receive better treatment then citizens: as he said, “We protect all of the criminals, we don’t protect our own people.” That did not finish Trump’s attack on immigrants, as he quickly turned the tables on the concept of sanctuary cities: remember that he said that: “We believe our country should be a sanctuary for law abiding citizens who love America”—not a sanctuary for others.
Trump Said That American Values Are Anti-Immigrant
As he continued, Donald Trump made it a basic American value to despise immigrants. Let us look at that next:
“They want to stop us from completing our mission to bring back American values. Secure America’s borders, millions and millions of people are pouring into our country. Nobody has any idea where they’re from. Last month, 129 countries were represented. They’re emptying their prisons into the United States of America.” [italics added]Well, Trump obviously contradicted himself. If “nobody has any idea where they’re from,” how could we possibly know that they represent 129 countries? The moral issue, however, is more important. That is, immigrants, in Trump’s rhetoric, were not refugees coming for a better life, no, they were criminals who foreign countries maliciously sent us from their prisons. Trump’s speech contrasted the supposedly virtuous American citizens against the criminal immigrants. once you accept Trump’s logic, the way to solve our problems is to keep immigrants away so native-born Americans can live their lives free of foreign contamination. So much for welcoming the “huddled masses.”
Do Immigrants Really Cause Our Crime Problem? No.
Trump’s examples misled his gullible audience, for the numbers clearly show that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at, statistically, a far lower rate than native-born Americans. A major study published in the prestigious Annals of Epidemiology concluded that:
“Results from the present study—conducted with a well characterized and highly-regarded national survey—provide clear and compelling evidence that immigrants are involved in violent and nonviolent criminal behaviors at substantially lower rates than US-born Americans.”For example, in my home state of Texas, native-born Americans are arrested for murder at twice the rate of undocumented immigrants. Native-born Americans are 2-1/2 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes. Let us keep in mind that the Texas border (which is not far from my home) is the poster for anti-immigrant fearmongering.
More broadly, the United States, like every nation, generates plenty of problems. Crime, income inequality, poverty, and public health all require careful solutions. However, if you want to pretend that we are not responsible for our problems, you need to blame someone else. Immigrants, who are often poor and vulnerable, make easy targets. That was Trump’s trick. The fault, as Shakespeare might have said, lies not in our stars (or our immigrants), but in ourselves.
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Earlier Trump Posts:
Divisive Rhetoric Continued in the 2018 US Midterms: The Case of Obama versus Trump
Trump, the "China Virus," and the Art of Controlling the Agenda by Misdirection
Hey! When Trump speaks well, I acknowledge it:
Research note: The idea that we can blame our problems on “the other” traces far back in human thought. Several scholars have investigated the subject. This month, I am reading essays by the communication critic Stuart Hall, highly recommended.
Image: Official White House photo
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