The Immigration Election

A Society-Breaking Issue

This last election largely turned around the question of immigration. The (often suppressed, but ultimately undeniable) reality of millions of people entering the U.S. illegally and being admitted and transported and housed and fed, while normal people struggled to put gas in their cars, was incredibly damaging to the elites. Here I will try to paint a picture for those who still haven’t grasped this fact, and issue a warning: this issue is of the nature to arouse rage and dethrone institutions and overthrow governments.

The idea that millions of outsiders can ignore laws and essentially be rewarded (even if that’s not the sole public policy rationale) touches something deep in the human soul. You can call it xenophobia but it’s inseparable from the impulse to help one’s family and love one’s country and support the enforcement of laws. This is a drive too deeply rooted to be shamed or silenced in ordinary people, who do not attend to or observe the empty verbal status games of elites. A support for borders and hometown and the rule of law truly is an immovable object. If your utopian dreams involve their eradication I must advise: you better think in centuries.

Imagine these three scenarios (which are all nonspecific, but real):

1. A wave of illegal immigrants pour into your city. Most of them are claiming asylum (although it’s a mathematical certainty that most of the claims are bogus). You’ve never received any direct help for housing or purchases from your city government. You’re a bus driver, as is your wife. The migrants are given thousands of dollars of aid in terms of rental vouchers and prepaid debit cards and food. They continue to arrive and are now being housed at the nearest high school. Your kids must now attend online classes (which have already been closely linked to plummeting mental health and academic performance). Basically, the guarantee of a public education for your kids is not fully being honored, and some of your wages are now going to subsidize these people. A migrant ends up stabbing another migrant near the school where they’re housed (in a busy residential neighborhood). The victim dies. The media reports on “fears of anti-immigrant sentiment” due to the stabbing and interviews no city police or local residents. Your government and the media are not asking you what you think about these changes-they’re telling you what to think.

2. You live in a small-ish rural town. Despite your government pledging to end massive expenditures on free lodgings for illegal immigrants you learn that 300 young men are being moved into a hotel downtown (which is the only hotel for 30 miles). All events at the hotel are abruptly cancelled, including two weddings. The traditional end-of-schoolyear dance afterparty is also cancelled by apologetic but cheerful local officials and teachers who grow uncomfortable and turn away when anger is expressed. The hotel lies 1/4 of a mile from the town’s middle school, and the residents are all ASSURED that there is no increased risk of crime. Everyone knows this is a lie. 300 unvetted young men from anywhere would be a risk! These are 300 young men who are there because they grew up amidst poverty and war and broke the law to get into your country! The local police and mayor dismiss your concerns and the media studiously avoids interviewing any of you (people are angry). You hear nothing about the new program in any regional newspaper or television station. “Surely this is newsworthy?” you wonder… It’s almost as if they’re suppressing any mention of the newcomers-and this is before there have been any problems! A man from a neighboring town is arrested for posting anti-immigrant memes online, which aren’t hateful but are brutally derisive of certain politicians. He spends 60 days in jail-at a time when many migrants have been released from jail due to “overcrowding”.

3. Your nation has admitted the greatest relative wave of human migration in modern history, almost. Huge amounts of wealth go toward supporting and housing these newcomers, most of whom are barred from working by law and culture. Anti-immigrant parties are becoming more and more popular and the media and governing parties are reacting with hysteria.

   A “diversity” festival is held in the neighboring town. Thousands of people pour into the streets, where a swarthy young man pulls out a large knife and begins stabbing and slashing people. Three people die and dozens are injured. Despite there being many eyewitnesses the media and police fail to circulate a description. National television stations speculate that the crime might be a “far-right” attack… even though 9 stabbings have already happened in your country and all of them were perpetrated by migrants (or their offspring). Finally the perpetrator turns himself in. Immediately, mentions of the crime and its aftermath disappear almost entirely from local or national news. You can’t find any mentions of the horror online and your government has only issued perfunctory statements of mourning. You don’t hate immigrants… but something isn’t right.

Every one of these accounts described real world events and there are THOUSANDS more… seeping into the national consciousness by a dozen different routes. The government generally refuses to address some very basic concerns and the media generally refuses to press them: Why are you giving our national resources to criminals? Why are young men being allowed into my country without vetting or identification? Why won’t anyone from the ruling class speak to us honestly about these changes?

These failures have discredited both government and media more than you probably understand.

The rulers don’t have answers. The people are allowed to enter because our ruling coalition has deemed it politically and economically advantageous (and morally righteous, apparently) to allow millions of newcomers to break the law and possibly degrade our quality of life. The degradation could happen in a dozen possible ways, all of which will be pooh poohed by the media. There’s very little chance that hundreds of homeless refugees (even if they’re not all young men, which they often are) will improve your life. Right? The compulsion to pretend that that’s not the case seems to be restricted to (1) folks who will benefit financially from mass migration (employers, non-profits, contractors-some of whom have made millions) or (2) folks who feel that compassion towards newcomers is a kind of abstract virtue. The problem is that these latter folks usually don’t live in the areas where migrants end up, and when they do they don’t like it. They are, to put it plainly, often privileged hypocrites (or older and overly sympathetic women).

How many headlines like this do you need to see before you grow tired of this elite-driven project and, while not anti-immigrant-there have been few acts of violence or even unfriendliness toward the migrants), anti-illegal immigration:

Illegal migrant convicted of violent assault on Martha’s Vineyard got released then allegedly raped a child — despite ICE requesting 3 times to detain him

There are non-profit organizations working diligently to make sure that Mr. Neto here had housing and sustenance, and has proper legal representation. The fact that you (a citizen) have access to none of these things is barely worth mentioning, and any comparison like that will be promptly dismissed by uncomfortable officials as ‘xenophobia’. Bigot.

Misinformation!

There are some very prominent post-election narratives. One of them centers around ‘misinformation’. According to this telling a vast and sinister right-wing ecosystem has allowed the germination of lies and misled the poor and simple voters. There are a few issues with this. There IS no ‘vast right-wing’ media ecosystem… relative to the left-wing ecosystem, at least. There is no data (that I’ve seen) which indicates that ‘misinformation’ was a decisive factor in the election’s outcome (unless ‘misinformation’ is defined as facts or opinions which are unfavored on the left, which is indeed how it’s often being used). There is similarly no data that X has a right-wing bias. Certainly it is now owned by a (recently declared) conservative… but when it was owned (and much more heavily policed and controlled) by Jack Dorsey and Vijaya Gadde and their federal co-conspirators that was never considered to be a negative factor. There is no data that X use influenced elections, in any particular direction. Most users and most use of X is by Leftists, according to data I’ve seen. How does who owns it matter?

The fact that NONE of these inconvenient claims (a trend, as you’ll see…) are ever addressed by people ostensibly worried by ‘misinformation’ should discredit the entire narrative altogether, in my opinion. Even if one believed it-that person should enter into this ecosystem (where MANY, many hosts would be happy to have you)! Express your ideas and defend your claims. Most of the ‘right-wing’ media I listen to was actually created by classical liberals and moderates:

Konstantin Kisin

and

Bridget Phetasy

and Triggernometry and the Joe Rogan Experience and

Peter Boghossian

, etc. These people aren’t shills of the Right. They’re willing (it seems) to talk to ANYONE. If your belief system was stable and rigorous enough you would surely go and defend it. Only one side demands censorship… and only one side runs from debate at every turn. These are, in my experience, the same side. Perhaps you see things differently. I would love to hear how. Are you as eager to hear the differing views of others?

There is a claim that the Right is whipping up ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment. I have actually found that politicians and other figures have been very hard on the government and the effects of their polices, but rarely against immigrants specifically (the “eating the cats” moment during the presidential debate is a notable and widely disliked exception). Often crimes committed by migrants are conflated with ‘anti-immigrant’ sentiment, but these can just as easily (and probably more fairly) be attributed to ‘anti-crime’ sentiment. In few cases (none that I’ve seen and can recall) have the speakers or writers involved extrapolated and made harmful generalizations about the people who have immigrated. Again: the hostility is against politicians and their policies… but these prominent targets will naturally find it convenient to hold up a tired and struggling group of marginalized people with which to shield themselves. That kind of thing has been happening in American politics for decades.

The other claim (which has been labelled “misinformation”) is the idea that migrants are more likely to commit crimes. I actually rarely hear the conservative case stated this way (I think it’s a straw man,

Richard Hanania

) but let’s say that is the claim. These are the nuanced questions which always arise in my mind… and have never once been addressed in the dozens of news stories and essays and interviews I’ve ingested:

1. Aren’t you drawing statistics from illegal immigrants who have been in this country for some time? How can you be sure this group is the same? In fact, we know it’s not, by every metric. There are more young men, more countries represented, more people altogether, there were different border policies (which will invite a different group of migrants), different continental distributions, different age cohort, etc.

2. Even if this is true nationwide there could be thousands of communities where immigrants DO raise the crime rate, given a standard distribution. Surely you will want to talk to those people… maybe explain the nature of statistics and deviations, to that family who just lost their daughter?

3. Surely some countries have seen an opportunity to divest themselves of criminals and dangerous characters? The fact that their leaving would be a gain for those areas (and a loss for us) tells me everything I need to know about the incentive structure at play.

4. What has been done to screen people who enter and minimize the rate of criminality, even if it is statistically indistinguishable from our current national rates?

5. Could there be issues of reporting or investigation or conviction of illegal immigrants which might skew these figures? If a thief targets illegal immigrants he’s less likely to be reported. If a victim of a DUI incident is illegal he is much less likely to stay around and pursue his complaint. Couldn’t these factors radically skew the documented crime rates of illegal immigrants?

6. How does this address the central complaint: people who shouldn’t have been in our country preyed upon and killed our countrymen? At best you’re indicating that the newcomers are equally dangerous as current residents… but if none of the benefits of their presence (friends, paying jobs, civic participation, linguistic commonality) exist for me, isn’t this still a negative?

I would recommend the watchdogs of disinformation attend to these points! I will be waiting, eagerly, for their answers.

I want to emphasize: these are emotional and salient topics, for everyone. If you cannot understand why people might bristle at foreigners entering their homeland and hurting people and using scarce resources, perhaps that’s because you have no conception of homeland or deep allegiance… and probably little conception of scarcity as well. It doesn’t make you a bad person to not want illegal immigration. It might make you a bad person to blithely press for it, and ignore the cries of distress.

The narrative is beginning to slip-badly. People don’t like paying a great deal of money to help waves of criminals join their communities and they bristle when people who shouldn’t legally be in the country to begin with commit crimes. “Migrant Crime” is simply a fact, and if it affected the media’s neighborhoods and families they would probably feel similarly about it. Don’t be like John Oliver (which is good advice for most any situation)!

A Prediction, and a Warning

To the Media

I would never claim to be prescient but I think I can detect the direction of media coverage for the next year or two: Trump’s plans to cut aid and deport and enforce border security will be made to sound extreme, even cruel. We can leave aside the apparent acceptance that these (potential) critics had toward the secondary effects of the wave of migration we’ve experienced during the past few years: rapes, child trafficking, deaths, etc. I will not delve in that direction, for hypocrisy and double standards lie embedded all throughout our political landscape and you would hardly be the first commentators to become outraged at things which your own championed favorites did (remember Obama’s deportations? I predict we will hear very little of them in the coming months).

My warning is more general, and graver: do not try to depict mass deportations or the unhousing of migrant families or the cutting off of aid as heartless or foolish things. This is what the voters wanted.

You already have a growing reputation of being out-of-touch and hopelessly compromised. 50% of the country hates your guts and 20% now knows that you're disingenuous, at best. If you want to begin to restore your credibility try this strange and (at first) difficult approach: try to approach these stories with the values of regular people and try to focus on the areas which regular people would be interested in! There might be an app or something to which you can refer when calibrating the values/focus in your story. You could also just find some regular people… and ask them.

The idea of immigrants taking over public schools and getting prepaid cards and assistance with transportation or phone plans makes regular people angry. Trump will probably see to it that these benefits end, post haste, and he will surely try to expel a large number of families and adults males (with criminals earning automatic deportation).

You might find this hasty or surprising or unkind (although, again, you’re not personally doing much to help these people) but I recommend that you do not incorporate these impressions into your reporting. Voters wanted these things to happen-that’s partly why they voted as they did.

If you ignore that fact you’ll only increase the diminishment of your viewers/readers and the erosion of your credibility.

To Our Leaders

Close our borders. Begin sending back people who should never have come in the first place. They only did come because they perceived, desperately (and correctly), that a certain ascendant political party would welcome and aid them, despite their presence here being, technically, illegal.

We’ve seen the failure of ‘good intentions’ and virtue signs as guides for policy-making: police reform, climate policy, gender modification treatments for minors… Policies must be evaluated based on their real costs (and harms) and benefits, not the status they lend you among your peers on X. It’s simply too late to adjudicate this policy and it would be a mistake to be seen dragging your feet.

An issue like this can destroy an administration’s legacy, and it can destroy a party. This is not the hill to die on. If you can’t find an answer for the townspeople who are suddenly surrounded by an expensive and dangerous crowd of strangers or the parents whose child was killed by an illegal immigrant (whether or not nervous camera crews are nearby) then just, for once in your lives, do the right thing.

Fix this.

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