Sex trafficking, lies and immigration

On Thursday, Alabama Senator Katie Britt delivered the Republican response to the State of the Union address.

Her exalted performance has been the subject of much ridicule;

That's fine for late-night TV shows, but I'm not going to join the chorus.

What I want to do rather is focus on the main focus of Britt's statements, a deeply misleading account of sex trafficking that the senator used to attack President Joe Biden.

His use of the story—which turns out to be related to events that occurred in Mexico back when George W. Bush was president—was not technically a lie, since he did not explicitly say that it had occurred in the United States during the Biden presidency.

However, she did say: “We wouldn't be okay with it if this happened in a third world country.

This is the United States of America, and it's about time we started acting like it.

“President Biden’s border crisis is a disgrace.”

This is a clear attempt to deceive—the moral equivalent of a lie—and the careful wording is a sign that he knew he was lying and wanted a way out in case someone caught his attention.

However, to truly understand the importance of his de facto lie, we must place it in a political context.

Over the past few months, there has been a palpable shift in Republican rhetoric, moving from attacks on Biden's economy to dire warnings about “immigrant crime.”

This change has been forced in part by the fact that Biden's economy is doing very well these days, with inflation declining and unemployment remaining near its lowest level in 50 years.

In political terms, the narrative of the economy's poor state appears to be losing steam.

If I were a Republican strategist, I would be especially concerned about the changing tone of news coverage.

The San Francisco Federal Reserve maintains a daily index of “news sentiment.”

In the summer of 2023, although the economy was arguably already doing quite well, this rate was roughly as low as it was in the midst of the Great Recession.

However, it has since skyrocketed to levels more or less comparable to those that prevailed on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Therefore, Republicans need a new issue.

And it does seem that there has been an increase in illegal attempts to cross our southern border.

So there are strategic reasons for Donald Trump and his party to exaggerate the dangers of immigrant crime, and for Trump and his allies to capitalize on the fear factor by blocking bipartisan legislation that would have helped secure the border. .

However, I would argue that Trump's tirades about immigrant crime are not purely strategic.

He is reputed to be obsessed with alleged crimes committed by dark-skinned people, dating back to his call to reinstate the death penalty following the arrests of the Central Park Five, who were eventually exonerated.

And his claims about the dangers posed by immigrants are so extreme that they could backfire.

The other day, for example, he declared: “I will make the murders stop, I will make the massacres stop, I will put an end to the agony of our people, the plundering of our cities, the plundering of our towns, the rape of our citizens and the conquest of our country.”

Exactly which towns and cities have been looted and plundered?

Did Attila the Hun come to visit while I wasn't looking?

Yes, finding the best way to secure our borders is a real problem, but the data does not show that there is an increase in crimes committed by immigrants.

In fact, homicides in the United States increased in 2020, a year when Trump was still president and apprehensions at the southern border had greatly decreased.

On the contrary, in the last two years, the homicide rate has decreased even though border activity has increased.

So what does one do when the numbers don't support their dystopian fantasies?

It focuses on the most horrific individual stories.

Without a doubt, the murder of Laken Riley, for which an immigrant who was in the country illegally has been charged, is devastating.

But in a country as large as ours, it is almost always possible to find examples of unspeakable tragedies carried out by individual members of any group.

There are surely more than 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States.

However, based on available evidence, immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans.

In any case, the wave of crimes committed by immigrants – the “looting of our cities” that Trump seems to tirelessly denounce – is a myth.

But maybe it's a myth that Trump believes, and the possibility that in this case he is being sincere is alarming.

Because?

Because if Trump really thinks that immigrants are an existential threat, if he wins in November, as president he could carry out his plan for mass raids and deportations, and very likely round up many people who simply look like immigrants who are in the country illegally.

So don't downplay Britt's statements as a mere example of terrible acting.

They could be the harbinger of a reign of terror that will wreak havoc on the United States.

Paul Krugman

is a Nobel Prize winner in Economics.

© The New York Times, 2024. 

Translation by News Clips. 

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