David Leonhardt
Op-Ed Columnist
The main reason that Mollie Tibbetts’s horrible killing has received so much attention is racism. Tibbetts’s accused murderer is a Mexican immigrant, and large segments of the conservative media, including talk radio and Fox News, like to call attention to crimes committed by people with dark skin. It’s silly to pretend otherwise. You’ll notice the pattern if you spend any time watching or listening to these media sources. The pattern becomes especially clear when they descend into falsehoods. Just look at the made-up story that Fox promoted last week about land seizures in South Africa, which led to a false tweet from President Trump about “the large-scale killing of farmers.” Or look at Lou Dobbs’s long history of telling on-air lies about immigrants (despite their comparatively low crime rates). Dobbs, other right-wing hosts and Trump have no such history of making up stories about crimes committed by white people. I don’t think it’s possible to have an honest conversation about the Tibbetts debate without acknowledging the role that race plays. But I also think that David A. French’s piece in National Review is worth reading, especially for progressives. French starts the piece by acknowledging the role of racism. That’s not his focus, though. His goal, instead, is to persuade readers that race is not the sole reason that the Tibbetts case resonates with so many people. “There are reasons why illegal-immigrant crime can carry a poignant punch among people of good will,” French writes. “The murderer wasn’t supposed to be here. I’m reminded of the pain that people feel when, for example, they find out (in different crimes) that the police didn’t follow up on a lead or a prisoner was wrongly released on parole. The feeling is palpable.” Imagine, for example, that you heard the killer in a mass shooting had been able to purchase a gun illegally, because of a failure in the background-check system. Wouldn’t that heighten your sense of injustice about the crime? For most of us, the answer is yes. “The official failure magnifies the personal injustice,” as French argues. We live in a society that is supposed to be governed by laws. When they are not followed or enforced, many people are bothered. And they are right to be. Society functions better when its rules mean something. I’m outraged by the racism that the many immigrants face, by the lies told about them and by the abuses that the Trump administration is committing against them. None of it is defensible, whether the immigrants arrived here legally or illegally. But once the disaster of the Trump presidency has passed, the United States really should rewrite its immigration laws with the goal of reducing illegal immigration (as Barack Obama and John McCain, among many other politicians, have advocated over the years). Toothless laws undermine people’s faith in their government — and create all kinds of kindling for mistrust and anger. On the same subject: Tibbetts’s relative, Sandi Tibbetts Murphy, wrote a moving denunciation of racism in a recent Facebook post. And several writers, including Rachael Revesz in The Independent and Amanda Marcotte in Salon, noted that gender is a far more important part of the story than immigration.
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Good to have Leonhardt back again! He actually presents a fairly sane “center left” view of the world. While he was on vacation, in an attempt to expose us sheltered NYT readers to the “world of the right” one of his “fill-ins” was the shameless Trump apologist Christopher Buskirk. While Leonhardt declared the “great experiment in broadening horizons” a smashing success, I beg to differ.
For about a week, Buskirk regaled us with condescending essays about why everybody in America should get with the program and warm up to the great benefits of having a racist, White Supremacist, xenophobic, chronic liar, ignorant, bullying, authoritarian, immoral, incompetent, climate change denying, crook, who was elected by a minority of voters, as President. The low point was his totally offensive attempt to exploit the Tibbetts tragedy by spewing the exact racist restrictionist nonsense that Leonhardt exposes and critiques.
To be honest, I know what drives Trump voters. While I would welcome them to the side of the “good guys,” and I certainly think that their genuine problems and issues should be addressed under “good government,” I don’t have too much hope that anybody who still supports Trump is “reachable.”
So, the real task isn’t to understand what weird or perverse things go in the minds of Trump’s hard-core “base.” No, it’s to get the majority of folks who don’t support Trump and his vision of a White Nationalist authoritarian kleptocracy to the polls to throw him and his enablers out before it’s too late for all of us (including his tone-deaf supporters — sometimes you have to have folks from themselves, even if they don’t want to be saved). Arrogant, disingenuous, pseudo-intellectuals like Buskirk are part of the problem, not the solution.
Moving on, I think that Mollie Tibbetts was an amazing person with so very much to offer the world. Her death is a horrible tragedy for her family and the rest of us. I deeply admire and am grateful for the way in which her father and the rest of her family have honored her kind, generous, and loving spirit by resisting the attempts of the racist right to make her a “cause celeb” for hatred and racial bigotry.
I agree with Leonhardt that we all would be better off if we solved the issues surrounding undocumented immigration. The answer is actually fairly straightforward: more properly screened legal immigrants to meet the realistic market needs of American employers and to satisfy our legal obligations to those who are persecuted. That would reduce undocumented immigration and allow DHS to concentrate on real criminals and those who come outside the more generous system. That’s likely to be a much lesser number than we have now.
Still, no system is capable of screening out all of those who might prove to be “bad actors” in the future, particularly where there is no past record of problems to go upon. However, to continue or “double down on” our current, overly restrictive, system is merely to guarantee that more and more individuals will be in the United States without the proper pre-screening and identification necessary to run an orderly system. America was built by immigrants (that’s all of us, except Native Americans), prospered because of them, and still needs them in large numbers to move forward into the future. That’s why the White Nationalist restrictionist proposals being pushed by Trump and his cohorts are not only stupid and immoral, but are ultimately doomed to failure.
PWS
08-29-18