On immigration, conservatives premiere a new office of political theater
Amid this law enforcement feeding frenzy, it's hard to see what more the administration's new VOICE office could do for the Lake family.
But maybe that's not the objective after all.
Maybe VOICE is nothing more than a propaganda tool through which the administration intends to pander to those who believe that the undocumented are predisposed to criminal activity.
That fits. Illegal immigrants are this administration's answer to Willie Horton. The 1988 presidential campaign of George H.W. Bush -- under the direction of GOP campaign strategist Lee Atwater -- made that furloughed convict a household name though an infamous television ad that attempted to portray then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. The ad was racist, and a textbook example of dirty pool.
Trump knows how to use racism to play dirty. He has labeled Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists and suggested that Mexico is glad to get rid of them. During the campaign, he often posed with folks who lost family members to crimes committed by illegal immigrants.
Still, the administration is way out of bounds on this one.
Implying that one group of people (immigrants) is more likely to commit crimes than another (the native-born) is immoral. And because the vast majority of illegal immigrants in the United States are Latino, it feeds the stereotype that foreigners of a certain ethnicity are natural-born criminals.
A hundred years ago, the same thing was said about Italian immigrants. Fear drove support for the Immigration Act of 1924, which kept out immigrants from "Southern Europe." Read: Italy.
But if illegal immigrants are so lethal, why do Americans invite these hooligans into their homes to do chores? Why do they give gardeners the pass-codes to their gated communities, and hand over their children to nannies? Perhaps most of these people aren't so dangerous after all.
The data confirms it. Studies show that illegal immigrants commit crimes at lower levels than the native-born. The FBI reports that cities with high numbers of illegal immigrants are among the safest in the country. After all, if you're afraid of being deported, why draw attention?
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