{"id":2579,"date":"2020-12-16T21:10:36","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T21:10:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiofree.org\/?p=140147"},"modified":"2020-12-16T21:10:36","modified_gmt":"2020-12-16T21:10:36","slug":"trumps-lies-about-immigrants-should-end-with-his-presidency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/12\/16\/trumps-lies-about-immigrants-should-end-with-his-presidency\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Lies About Immigrants Should End With His Presidency"},"content":{"rendered":"
As Donald Trump finally prepares to be evicted from the White House, it\u2019s worth remembering how he first launched his campaign: by calling immigrants \u201cmurderers\u201d and \u201crapists.\u201d<\/p>\n
This was outrageous then. And there\u2019s more evidence now that it was, of course, patently false.<\/p>\n
A new study<\/a> finds that \u201cundocumented 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfounded accusations of criminality are a longstanding tool of racism and other forms of bigotry across a range of social categories.<\/p>\n The study concludes that there\u2019s \u201cno evidence that undocumented criminality has become more prevalent in recent years across any crime category.\u201d Previous studies found no evidence to support Trump\u2019s claim<\/a>, but now we have better data than ever before.<\/p>\n Put another way, Trump was telling a dangerous lie.<\/p>\n Sociologists Michael Light, Jingying He, and Jason Robey used crime and immigration data from Texas from 2012 to 2018 to find that \u201crelative 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Unfounded accusations of criminality are a longstanding tool of racism and other forms of bigotry across a range of social categories.<\/p>\n When anti-LGBTQ activist Anita Bryant wanted to discriminate against gays and lesbians in the 1970s, she claimed we molest children<\/a>. More recently, when transphobic people wanted to ban trans women from women\u2019s bathrooms, they falsely claimed that trans women<\/a> would rape cisgender women in bathrooms.<\/p>\n Consider how much anti-Black racists justified their actions in the name of \u201cprotecting white women\u201d 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 1989, the Central Park Five \u2014 five Black and Latino boys between the ages of 14 and 16 \u2014 were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for raping a white woman. They didn\u2019t do it<\/a>. In 2002, someone else confessed and DNA evidence confirmed it. (Trump, who took out full-page ads calling for their execution then<\/a>, never apologized.)<\/p>\n Racism and bigotry are about power<\/a> and status<\/a>. 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 \u2014 even if the reasons are completely untrue. Bigotry is much easier to market if it can masquerade as fighting crime.<\/p>\n