On Saturday we learned that the Trump administration is (finally) getting the ball rolling on building a “big, beautiful” border wall between the United States and Mexico.
Thank God. As I explained in “Why I Fully Support Trump’s Border Wall,” the need for this is clear as day. Trump has given us all kinds of reasons why this is a good use of taxpayer money (all Mexicans are “rapists” and other incontrovertible yet simultaneously “alternative” facts), but really he’s preaching to the proverbial choir.
After all, Americans know perhaps better than anyone else what happens when you open your borders (and hearts) to immigrants. But maybe you’ve forgotten the backstory here. For those in need of a refresher, consider the following (true) account of America’s history with illegal immigrants:
When you really sit down and think about it, Americans should have built a wall a long time ago. But not necessarily on the southern border.
America should have started by building a wall along the Eastern seaboard.
As you may or may not know, illegal immigrants have been flooding into this great country of ours for a very long time. This was a problem way before Trump.
Once I found that out, I did some research and it turns out the new President’s characterization of Mexican immigrants applies equally to the illegals of yesteryear. America let them in and guess what they did? They raped and they spread disease. The bastards even spread disease on purpose!
But that’s not all.
Do you know what else they did? They pretended to be our friends and then, when we weren’t looking, they stole our land and built illegal settlements on it! Of course we’re a forgiving people, so we tried to look past that rather egregious incursion.
And our benevolence didn’t stop there.
One time, the illegals damn near starved/froze to death because they underestimated the severity of our winters and wouldn’t you know it, they were too damn stupid to store up enough food to last until spring. So do you know what we did? We gave them some of our food and we saved their f*cking lives, that’s what we did.
Now you’d think that after that, they’d show some respect for us. But they didn’t. Instead they took more land, built more settlements, and when we tried to stop them, they shot us.
We tried shooting back, but that didn’t work out very well because we were firing arrows and they had gunpowder.
These type of injustices continued for decades and eventually we packed up all our sh*t and moved far enough west to get away from these heathens. Or so we thought.
The next thing you know, they’re moving west too (some sh*t about “manifest destiny” and gold).
By the time it was all over, we were relegated to what they called “reservations” where we were forced to eke out a living selling trinkets in order to afford a pint of cheap liquor.
Oh, and I forgot to mention they named a holiday after that time we saved their lives — the smart-asses.
See? They really are “rapists,” and they really are “bringing drugs.”
But moving from the satirical to the serious, consider the following from The Hill, who notes that contrary to the lie you’re being force fed, immigrants commit far less crime than US-born citizens.
Immigrants commit crimes and are incarcerated at a much lower rate than U.S. citizens, according to two separate studies released this week.
A study by The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice research and advocacy group, found that “foreign-born residents of the United States commit crime less often than native-born citizens.”
Another study, by the libertarian Cato Institute, compares incarceration rates by migratory status, ethnicity and gender.
“All immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives relative to their shares of the population,” the Cato study reads.
On the campaign trail and as president, Donald Trump has portrayed illegal immigration as a dual risk: an economic threat and a source of increased crime.
Under President Trump’s 2018 budget request, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) budget would grow by $3 billion to fund his proposed border wall and executive orders on immigration.
When he launched his presidential bid, Trump said that illegal immigrants “are bringing crime.” And in speeches, he frequently mentions individuals whose loved ones have been killed by illegal immigrants.
“It’s all enforcement-only, following the rhetoric of Trump that he used in the campaign and continues to use, making immigrants at fault for everything, from crime to the economy,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.).
But the two studies don’t point to immigrants posing more of a threat of crime than citizens born in the U.S.
Among people aged 18-54, 1.53 percent of natives are incarcerated, as are 0.85 percent of undocumented immigrants and 0.47 percent of documented immigrants, according to the Cato study of comparative incarceration rates.
The Cato study found that there are about 2 million U.S-born citizens, 123,000 undocumented immigrants and 64,000 documented foreign citizens in U.S. jails.
If natural-born citizens were incarcerated at the same rate as undocumented immigrants, “about 893,000 fewer natives would be incarcerated,” read the study. Similarly, if native citizens were incarcerated at the same rate as documented immigrants, 1.4 million fewer would be in prison.
“Alternative facts”?
