The Republican National Convention (RNC) took place Monday, July 15, 2024, – Thursday, July 18, 2024. Over these four days, speaker after Republican speaker disparaged President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. Attacking their record on the economy and the Israeli-Hamas conflict, among others. However, there was one issue they all focused on most vociferously: the immigration lie. Each and everyone articulated that illegal immigrants kill and rape Americans en masse. Donald Trump, surrounded by sycophants, devoted a large portion of his acceptance speech, continuously stoking fear into his credulous conventioners. And this is the lie that the Republicans have been perpetuating since Trump made his first speech announcing his run for President in 2015,
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
The facts do not coincide with the MAGA rhetoric about immigrant crime. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research, in a report called Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-born, 1870–2020 (you can download the report here).
As a group, immigrants have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born for 150 years. Moreover, relative to the US-born, immigrants’ incarceration rates have declined since 1960: immigrants today are 60% less likely to be incarcerated (30% relative to US-born whites).
That leads me to an article I wrote back on February 6, 2024, titled White Men Are Mass Murderers (well, not all). Why am I writing about this again? The answer is very simple: I am tired of MAGA’s control of the immigration narrative, especially as it relates to Latinos. These MAGA folk love to blame everything that is wrong with America on immigrants. They say that Latinos are drug dealers, murderers, and rapists and that they take jobs away from real Americans. While the facts speak for themselves, many of them do not care about facts. They operate on emotion and with a false sense of proprietary; it is unfortunate that many in the MAGA movement simply fear or dread the browning of America.
Between 2022 and 2023, the Hispanic population accounted for just under 71% of the overall growth of the United States population, driven primarily by Hispanic births, according to newly released Vintage 2023 Population Estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. “The Hispanic population is expanding at a substantially faster rate than the non-Hispanic population, primarily due to natural increase, that is, more births than deaths,” said Kristie Wilder, a demographer in the Census Bureau’s Population Division.
The slow growth within the non-Hispanic population reflects a slight decline in the non-Hispanic White population. (read more here: New Estimates Highlight Differences in Growth Between the U.S. Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Populations).
Breaking News Sangamon County deputy Sean Grayson was indicted for murder in the shooting of Sonya Massey.
Another heinous murder has occurred. A black woman, while in her own home, was shot in the face three times and murdered by a white policeman, not an immigrant, after she called the police to report suspicion of an intruder. This calamity is all too routine- White men killing black people and usually getting away with it. The disease of racism is so insidious that many do not recognize that they suffer from it. Why else would it be so easy for white men to kill black people? Why would so many white people hate today’s immigrants? Before 1965, many immigrants (15 million through Ellis Island) were white. The argument that most of them promulgate is that those immigrants came here legally. Again, facts tell us something different. If the restrictions had been in place, many of their ancestors would not have been allowed to enter the U.S. Also, back then, there was no such thing as an illegal alien.
Today, there is no such a thing as Ellis Island, there is no way for the immigrants fleeing the horrendous situations in there homeland (like the millions that fled their homeland due to a potato famine). America is as wonderful as it is. I am a proud American and would not want to live in any place else, but it has a very dark history. For example, slavery, the Chinese Exclusionary Act, Japanese internment camps, Jim Crow, Separate but {un)equal, and, of course, today’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. But I am not naive, I know that there are crimes committed by immigrants, including drug sales, rape and murder. However, as horrible as these crimes are, they are not committed as frequently as the MAGA wants you to believe. Serious immigrant crimes are few and far between. Unfortunately, white-on-black or brown murder is all too common. This violence is a disease, just as racism is a disease.
If you check out the article, White Men Are Mass Murderers (well, not all), you will see several recent high-profile cases of murder — none of which were committed by immigrants that have taken place yet that MAGA never talks about.
Let us not forget that it was just two weeks ago, on Saturday, July 13, 2024, that a white man, also not an immigrant, who was armed with an AR-style rifle attempted to murder ex-president Donald Trump during his rally in Pennsylvania just days before the RNC.
