Americans are increasingly using immigrants as the root cause of all their problems. Being the universal scapegoat is hard work, and perhaps we should pay them for the service. After all, it allows us to completely ignore our real problems while pretending like we are actually doing something to solve them.
It is at least somewhat understandable that a misunderstanding of the economic benefits of immigration can lead people to believe that immigrants are economically harming our country (an argument dealt with here). It’s a false claim, but at least it has some superficial plausibility. Blaming them for crime and violence, however, is just insulting as well as being wrong. It’s completely understandable that immigrants would be upset about this.
But no less than the governor of Arizona had a TV commercial made that puts the blame squarely in the lap of our hard working immigrant population.
Arizona’s new law is partially a reaction to the tragic killing of a rancher by an alleged illegal immigrant. But is the alleged fact that the killer was an immigrant (legal or illegal) relevant here? After all, you don’t need new laws to make killing illegal. Are such occurrences a sign of an immigrant crime wave sweeping the state? In point of fact, violent crime has actually gone down over the last decade. As Steve Chapman has pointed out in his article How Immigration Crackdowns Backfire:
Over the last decade, the violent crime rate [in Arizona] has dropped by 19 percent, while property crime is down by 20 percent. Crime has also declined in the rest of the country, but not as fast as in Arizona.
Again, immigrants primarily come here to work, and the vast majority of them wish to stay out of trouble for fear of being deported. This is true for legal immigrants, but it is especially true for illegal immigrants. They want to do everything possible to not attract attention to themselves. (It’s worth mentioning here that Milton Friedman considered it even more beneficial for the American economy if the immigration was illegal.)
So if not immigration, what is responsible for the crime that Governor Brewer is referencing in her ad? If you watch it, you may notice that all of it has to do with drug trafficking. It is true that Mexico and many other Latin American countries have a drug problem. It is also true that this problem is currently spilling over our southern border. But it is not true that immigration is to blame. For that, you would have to look at our long fought War on Drugs, which has been escalating ever since Nixon declared it a “war” four decades ago. Today, it can be described only as an utter failure. It is not just that it has failed, for a long time it has been obvious that it is a war that can never succeed. And yet we keep fighting it. Why? As O’Grady points out,
The drug-warrior industry, which includes both the private-sector and a massive government bureaucracy devoted to “enforcement,” has an enormous economic incentive to keep the war raging.
But for all the supply side assaults, demand is what keeps the drug suppliers in business, and America has plenty of demand which will not be eliminated any time soon (read “never”). As O’Grady makes clear, “strong demand and the high profits that are the result of prohibition make illegal trafficking unstoppable.” But attacking demand comes with it’s own problems, not the least of which include SWAT team raids of Americans for misdemeanor drug possession, often by mistake. These days, even small towns in America have their own SWAT teams, often conducting anywhere between one and five raids per day. If, for whatever reason, a SWAT team does storm your house in the middle of the night with a “no-knock” warrant and you do the rational thing and take measures to defend yourself and your family, who do you think is going to get prosecuted, if you even survive the attack? In one case, the local police department gave their SWAT team an award for bravery after a botched raid on the house of an innocent family. As one commentator noted,
Do we really want to live in a country where when someone busts into your house at night you’re supposed to assume they might be cops?”
Increasingly, this is not the America of the future, it is the America of the present. So why dedicate entire departments of government to fighting a hopeless war which only enriches criminals by pushing up profit potential, then turn around and blame the entire mess on “immigration?” It is pure avoidance of the true problem, and it is a problem that severely impacts the civil liberties of Americans, as well as vilifying a hard working and diverse group of people. The fact that there are vanishingly few people in America today who do not have immigrant ancestry makes the insult all the more bewildering.
Al Capone would not have been possible without America’s noble experiment. The violence and crime that is erupting on our borders is a direct result of our failed drug war and has little to do with immigration. Our continued denial of this only enables the existence of a hundred Capones, while the actions of our government only serve to make their products more profitable, to the extent that drug farmers in America cringe at the thought of legalization, let alone the cartels south of the border, which would essentially be put out of business overnight. New laws making people carry ID cards will do nothing to solve the problem. A “papers please” regime sets a bad precedent for our country, infringing on the civil liberties of Americans. There is little reason to believe that such laws won’t be abused. It’s time to stop blaming the innocent and realize that this is a problem largely of our own making.
