New data confirms that Trump lies about immigrants and crime.
By
Jill Richardson for OtherWords
As Donald Trump finally prepares to be evicted from the White House, it’s worth remembering how he first launched his campaign: by calling immigrants “murderers” and “rapists.”
This
was outrageous then. And there’s more evidence now that it was, of course,
patently false.
A
new study finds that “undocumented
immigrants have considerably lower crime rates than native-born citizens and
legal immigrants across a range of criminal offenses, including violent,
property, drug, and traffic crimes.”
The
study concludes that there’s “no evidence that undocumented criminality has
become more prevalent in recent years across any crime category.” Previous studies found no evidence to support Trump’s
claim, but now we have better data than ever before.
Put
another way, Trump was telling a dangerous lie.
Sociologists Michael Light, Jingying He, and Jason Robey used crime and immigration data from Texas from 2012 to 2018 to find that “relative to undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.”
Unfounded
accusations of criminality are a longstanding tool of racism and other forms of
bigotry across a range of social categories.
When
anti-LGBTQ activist Anita Bryant wanted to discriminate against gays and
lesbians in the 1970s, she claimed we molest children. More
recently, when transphobic people wanted to ban trans women from women’s
bathrooms, they falsely claimed that trans women would
rape cisgender women in bathrooms.
Consider
how much anti-Black racists justified their actions in the name of “protecting
white women” from Black men. In 1955, a white woman, Carolyn Bryant Donham,
wrongly claimed that a 14-year-old Black boy, Emmett Till, grabbed her and
threatened her. White men lynched Till in retaliation. More than half a century
later, Donham revealed that her accusations were false.
In
1989, the Central Park Five — five Black and Latino boys between the ages of 14
and 16 — were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for raping a white
woman. They didn’t do it. In 2002, someone else
confessed and DNA evidence confirmed it. (Trump, who took out full-page ads calling for their execution
then, never apologized.)
Racism
and bigotry are about power and status. Yet instead of openly admitting
that they want to punish other people simply for existing, most bigots find
reasons that sound plausible to the uninformed — even if the reasons are
completely untrue. Bigotry is much easier to market if it can masquerade as
fighting crime.
It
wasn’t just Trump himself. During the Trump administration, officials like
the U.S. solicitor general argued before
the Supreme Court that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately likely to
commit crime. Data: None. Claims: False.
As
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said, “You are entitled to your
opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
So
when you hear a claim that a particular group of marginalized people are
criminals, question it. What is the evidence for the claim? What is the
evidence against the claim? Why is the person making the claim, and how will
they benefit if people believe them?
If
someone cites research, who performed the research, and who funded it? Do the
funders have a financial stake in the research findings? Was it published in a
peer-reviewed journal? Is the data publicly available for others to replicate
the findings?
In
this case, the research debunking this racist lie was government-funded,
peer-reviewed in a major journal, and the data is available to the public.
Hearing
that particular group of people poses a threat to your safety can be frightening.
But because such claims have been used throughout history to spread bigotry
against marginalized groups, they should always be fact-checked.
In
this case, the evidence is clear. Trump stoked anti-immigrant sentiment in the
name of fighting crime, and his claims were baseless and false. The lie should
end with his presidency.
Jill Richardson is
the founder of the blog La Vida Locavore and a member of
the Organic
Consumers Association policy advisory board. She is the author
of "Recipe for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and
What We Can Do to Fix It" (2009).