The BDN Opinion section operates independently and does not set news policies or contribute to reporting or editing articles elsewhere in the newspaper or on bangordailynews.com
Amy Fried is a retired political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
Everyone is afraid of something. And whether it’s public speaking, spiders or heights, people often try to get over or at least live with their fears.
But once again Donald Trump is promoting fear of immigrants, using Nazi-like language by calling undocumented migrants “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Some of this rhetoric focuses on the danger women purportedly face.
According to Trump, women fear immigrants in their private spaces, saying “they don’t want illegal immigrants knocking on their front door and saying I’m going to use your kitchen and I’m going to use your bedroom.”
Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama gave the Republican response to the State of the Union address this year and it also included fear-mongering about migrants. Sitting in her kitchen, Britt told the horrific story about meeting a woman, later confirmed to be Karla Jacinto Romero, who had been sex-trafficked and gang raped. She implied this happened in the United States during Joe Biden’s presidency and his border policies were to blame.
But as Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler notes, Britt was “talking about a woman who was working in brothels in Mexico during the George W. Bush administration. … Biden has nothing to do with Jacinto’s story.” Indeed, Jacinto herself deemed Britt’s use of her personal horror for political purposes “not fair.”
While there are certainly valid policy discussions about what to do about America’s immigration system and the situation at the southern border, Trump, Britt and others aren’t contributing to that in a reasoned way.
Good policy making requires having high-quality data. We need that data to answer two key questions.
One, do undocumented immigrants commit more violent crimes? According to a study by three criminologists using data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, they do not. They found that “Contrary to public perception, we observe considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to legal immigrants and native-born U.S. citizens and find no evidence that undocumented criminality has increased in recent years.”
As Maine criminologists Steven Barkan and Michael Roque recently explained, immigrants have lower rates of crime because they are seeking a better life, want to stay out of trouble and avoid deportation, and have strong families and community ties.
Two, what sort of people are the most dangerous? According to data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, being killed by strangers is definitely not the norm. Moreover, “A larger percentage of males (21 percent) were murdered by a stranger than females (12 percent).”
In Maine last year, two individuals killed four or more people. Those two, Robert Card and Joseph Eaton, both U.S. citizens from Maine, were responsible for 22 of the state’s 53 homicides.
Overall murder rates in the U.S. are down after a spike that started in 2020.
None of this should imply that our immigration system is perfect (or that every undocumented migrant is nonviolent). Yet, earlier this year, Trump stopped congressional Republicans from passing comprehensive legislation negotiated by both parties.
Responding to Trump’s sabotage, Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican representing North Carolina, said, “I didn’t come here to have the president as a boss or a candidate as a boss. I came here to pass good, solid policy.” Tillis called it “immoral” to look “the other way because you think this is the linchpin for President Trump to win.” Unfortunately, political games blocked this legislation.
We should also remember the good that immigrants do, along with their hard work and their place in our American dream.
In a beautiful essay Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch tells the story of the undocumented immigrants who were filling potholes on the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore in the middle of the night when it and they fell to their demise. As the brother of one of the men told reporters, “He said it didn’t matter what time or where the job was, you had to be where the work was.”
As Bunch concludes, “These six workers who perished were not ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’ they were replenishing it. This is a moment of clarity when we need to reject the national disease of xenophobia.”
Fear is a normal emotion. This year we should spurn candidates who fear-monger against immigrants.