So...Trump had the brilliant (sarcasm) idea of publishing the crimes committing by immigrants to inflame anti immigrant sentiment in the United States. This is....wow. I can't believe we're actually having this discussion. I hate to play the Nazi card since it's so overplayed with Trump, but this idea really is reminiscent of the Nazis publishing crimes of the Jews, as others have pointed out.
But don't worry, I don't plan on just calling this idea fascist and leaving it at that. I want to dissect why this is a stupid idea. So, say we publish a list of crimes committed by illegals every week. There are 11 million or so illegal immigrants in the US right now. Say 1% of these guys commit crimes over the course of a year, that's 110,000. That means if there were a weekly newsletter detailing their crimes, each news letter would contain a list of 2115 crimes a week. That seems like a lot of crime, and taking it in all at once, the reader of these newsletters who are already skeptical of illegal immigrants will confirm their bias that illegal immigrants are horrible people who should be deported. They'll talk about how X person murdered so many people, or how Y person broke into their house. They would point to the victims of these crimes and talk about how if we had decent immigration policy we wouldn't have had all these problems. The message of the newsletter will paint illegal immigrants, and arguably immigrants in general in a bad light, and stoke xenophobia in the masses.
But here's the problem with that. If 1% of illegal immigrants committed crime in the United States, that's really not that bad. Translated to crime rates, it would be 1,000 people per 100,000 people. Meanwhile the most recent statistics put violent crime at 373/100k people, and property crime at 2487/100k people. Combined, that means that a little less than 3% of people commit crimes or so. Which would make immigrants in this hypothetical scenario more peaceful than your average American.
Before going into what the actual illegal immigrant crime rate is, I'm going to point out that I'm trying to demonstrate just how irrational it is to post a newsletter full of names and the crimes they committed. It paints this horrible picture of immigrants that just is not necessarily true when looked at statistically. It's very misleading and plays on peoples' emotions. For all we know, sure, illegal immigrants might commit more crime, but they might also commit less, or they might commit the same amount, and if they're not committing significantly more then it's kind of stupid to blame a whole group over crimes when the overwhelming majority of people who are illegal immigrants are peaceful and harming no one. Even worse, to actually get into the real rates, they actually do commit less than native born residents. Oh crap.
This is the faulty logic of xenophobia, so many of their arguments just aren't based on statistics. They base their views on emotions and anecdotes, often with incomplete information, and this can present a misleading picture. It only takes one nut like the San Bernardino shooter to argue that migrants from Muslim countries are bad. That one guy will put an image in peoples' heads and get them scared, and it doesn't matter if there are tens of thousands of good examples for every bad one, people will focus on the bad one and base their entire argument on that. Same with welfare. I already did an article on that. I always hear how illegals are sucking up our welfare, but once again, such an argument is not necessarily based on data. These people don't care about data, or statistics, or facts. They're making their decisions based on fear and emotion. And that's exactly what this proposed newsletter would accomplish too. It would stoke peoples' fears of immigrants, ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of them are law abiding, and even though they actually commit fewer crimes than people born in the US.
That said, this is a stupid, dangerous, harmful idea that will fan the flames of xenophobia unnecessarily. Not only is this idea that illegal immigrants commit these crimes based on anecdotes and emotions, but it does not paint a good picture of what's going on with crime within the illegal immigrant population statistically. All the person will see is a list of crimes and the kneejerk reaction to that will be "how horrible, we must be something". In reality, illegal immigrants seem to commit less crime than native born residents, and policies implemented to publish their crimes will create a false image of the problems with illegal immigrant crime in our country. This is some scary stuff.
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