By Amien Kacou*<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has made fighting illegal immigration a top<\/a> law enforcement priority. But, despite the President\u2019s frequent displays of availability bias\u2014if not vicious cynicism\u2014on this issue, it is<\/a> well-established<\/a> that immigrants, regardless of legal status or origins, are on average<\/a> less likely than citizens to commit most crimes. In fact, their presence usually translates to an overall reduction of crime<\/a> rates in areas where they settle.<\/p>\n Likewise, at the border, though the President conflates all unauthorized entrants with so-called \u201cbad hombres<\/a>,\u201d his Chief of Staff admits<\/a>, \u201cthe vast majority of the people that move illegally into the United States are not bad people. They’re not criminals. They’re not MS-13.\u201d A minority<\/a> of unauthorized immigrants still employs human smugglers (partly due to the dearth of legal admission options<\/a> for asylum seekers, and perhaps soon due to people getting turned away<\/a> at ports of entry). But we ought not also conflate these smugglers with more functionally violent foreign actors (gangs<\/a>, terrorists<\/a>, or human<\/a> and drug<\/a> traffickers\u2014keeping in mind that we are dealing, in the first three cases at least, with low range or low frequency threats and ought not be fooled, as a result, into the irrational urge to police \u201cunknown unknowns<\/a>\u201d).<\/p>\n Attorney General Jeff Sessions may be as pious as President Trump seems wanton in their joint infliction of extremely severe penalties\u2014at almost any price<\/a>\u2014on unauthorized immigrants, supposedly<\/a> as necessary to protect the rule of law and prevent an invasion through \u201copen borders,\u201d even if we are nowhere near<\/a> historic levels of unauthorized immigration. Sober experience and basic logic counsel against such false choices\u2014or slippery-slope fallacies. This country has had a solid tradition<\/a> of immigrant legalizations, none of which ever triggered a crime wave or public disorder of any sort. On the contrary<\/a>, our last mass legalization led to further decrease in crime. Critics will retort that repeated legalizations hinder the rule of law at some fundamental level. But the time when Congress needs to reassess the soundness and equity<\/a> of its laws is not a question of abstract principle; it is ultimately a question of circumstance, including the tragic mismatch between past laws and emerging realities\u2014as sometimes reflected in public opinion<\/a>.<\/p>\n Besides, there are good, concrete reasons why strict enforcement of the laws is not always the norm. Speed limit enforcement, for instance, is famously non-legalistic<\/a> (even though speeding kills tens of thousands of people every year). This reflects the fact that, in practice, \u201claw and order\u201d must bend not only to a higher law of scarce administrative resources<\/a> but also to a higher order of political priorities\u2014if not directly to advance community values, then at least to avoid counterproductive outcomes. Indeed, myopically stringent border and deportation policies of the past and present have produced negative externalities on anti-drug<\/a> and anti-gang<\/a> efforts (later cited to justify more deportations and border controls, in a vicious circle). They have also triggered a backlash against their abject, immoral, illegitimate cruelty, from both the public and civil<\/a> or other political institutions\u2014including courts<\/a>. Not to mention the community-oriented local law enforcement authorities who, for the same and other pragmatic reasons, have withdrawn their cooperation from federal immigration enforcement activities, in a significant setback<\/a> to the President\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n Maybe, despite these facts, the policy case for aggressive immigration enforcement would carry some weight if immigration itself<\/em> were reasonably presumed<\/em> to pose some threat to the public\u2014if it carried an inherently dangerous seed, albeit one somehow deeply buried in data noise. For example, imagine population growth held a simple, positive linear relationship with increases in crime. In reality, it does not<\/a>; but the Trump administration\u2019s immigration policies typically seem to sprout from similar zero-sum axioms (notwithstanding the President and his allies\u2019 surreal personal double-standards). This is manifestly what drives its officials\u2019 legislative proposals to restrict legal<\/em> immigration in order to restore some imaginary demographic balance, as a \u201ccorrective<\/a> . . . to the lenient policies of the past.\u201d The same can be said of their decision to purge once-celebrated national slogans of immigrant inclusivity, allegedly in order to reaffirm the government\u2019s \u201ccommitment<\/a> . . . to the American people;\u201d or of their willingness to recycle classic<\/a> fallacies of job scarcity, while \u201cpulling<\/a> an \u2018All Lives Matter\u2019 on DREAMers.\u201d<\/p>\n Repeating \u201cevery life matters<\/a>\u201d (really<\/em> to say that every citizen\u2019s life matters more<\/em>) is one slick way Trump allies concoct a convenient moral alibi for peddling clearly false public safety arguments in support of harsh immigration enforcement policies. With this, they aim, crucially, to shift the burden of proof to their critics\u2019 patriotism for failing to rage against any<\/em> contribution\u2014however accidental<\/a>\u2014unauthorized immigration might make to any<\/em> citizen ever<\/em> getting harmed. Here, it becomes crucial that, \u201cbut for<\/a>\u201c an unauthorized immigrant\u2019s unlawful presence (or for the support of his or her political \u201cenablers\u201d), any harm he or she causes would likely not have occurred. Immigration hardliners purport to find this contingency so intolerable that it eclipses in their minds virtually all other relevant considerations. Or, as former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone<\/a> put it, with more panache: \u201cIf one illegal immigrant kills one American citizen, then the system has failed.\u201d<\/p>\n Never mind that \u201cbut for\u201d causation is a notoriously deficient, misleading criterion for assigning fault. An intending immigrant\u2019s presence in the U.S., in and of itself, is not a characteristic or otherwise foreseeable factor of homicide. And the fact that such presence is in violation of U.S. immigration laws is essentially coincidental. Imagine, by analogy, that Jill murdered Jack after driving nonstop to the location of her violent crime on an expired license or registration (which, like unlawful presence, is a civil administrative violation), or even on a fake license or registration (a more serious crime in many states than the petty misdemeanor of first illegal entry). Would it not seem odd for a politician to initiate a crackdown on expired\/fake licenses or registrations by asking us to remember this event? If so, why does it not seem similarly absurd to blame illegal immigration for sporadic unauthorized immigrant crimes?<\/p>\n There is no debate that our government should prioritize our safety and welfare in at least some ways. (We are entitled to some sense of ownership over our country\u2014whether for our past contributions to its assets, for our psychological association with its history, symbols and folklore, or even for the unearned windfall of the accidents of our births and social trajectories in it.) This changes nothing to the fact that even citizenism<\/a> has moral limits\u2014immigrants, too, have rights; immigration law could never be legitimate if they did not. Indeed, international law protects asylum seekers from refoulement<\/a>, and the U.S. constitution demands due process<\/a> in immigration proceedings while guaranteeing equal protection of the laws to all persons<\/em> in the United States. Federal judges do retain an institutional bias\u2014a rigid<\/a> conception of national sovereignty\u2014which all-too-often<\/a> favors sparing the political branches from any meaningful scrutiny over their interpretation and regulation of those requirements. But this tendency is mitigated by other doctrines, such as the \u201clongstanding principle<\/a>\u201d to resolve persistent ambiguities of immigration laws in favor of immigrants.<\/p>\n Trumpism\u2019s wicked appeal, however, comes precisely from its ever-daring, corrosive rationalization for rejecting those basic principles of justice for all, fueled by ever more bad faith (including officials\u2019 increasingly blatant<\/a> distortions<\/a> of relevant facts) and ruthlessness in all areas of immigration policy. From the President profiling and dehumanizing<\/a> unaccompanied migrant teens<\/a> in his speeches (with the moral alibi of \u201chonest\u201d inarticulateness or political incorrectness), to his agency heads ordering their officers to forcefully seize young accompanied migrant children from their parents in order to deter<\/a> unauthorized family entries, without plans to reunite them. One moment, those same agency heads are grabbing adjudicating officers<\/a> in their ranks, as well as heads of local governments<\/a>, by their respective organizational collars, threatening the first with retaliatory dismissals and the second with criminal prosecutions if they fail to lend a hand in the President\u2019s efforts to reduce access to asylum and immigration of any kind (by arbitrary means if necessary). The next moment, the President is calling<\/a> for a policy of instant deportations of all<\/em> undocumented persons at the border \u201cwith no Judges or Court Cases.\u201d<\/p>\n As it often has, racial bias\u2014whether overt, concealed, or ironicized<\/a>\u2014provides a deeply<\/a> plausible<\/a> complementary explanation for why Trumpists<\/a> find in the field of immigration such free and fertile ground to give substance to their quarrelsome, offensive politics (where \u201czero tolerance<\/a>\u201d\u2014extreme intolerance\u2014is the ideal culmination of an escalating process of strategic field polarization). But hijacking the presumed privileges of citizenship attracts a larger range of voters and is less obviously objectionable than directly going to bat for White privilege; so long as patriotism remains \u201cgospel,\u201d so to speak, many people will remain vulnerable to erring from citizenism (\u201ccitizens first\u201d) to zero-sumism (\u201conly<\/em> citizen lives matter\u201d).<\/p>\n Roger Stone\u2019s apocalyptic take on rare incidents of unauthorized immigrants killing citizens illustrates the perverse interaction between these various types of social\u2014or antisocial\u2014bias. It contrasts notably with the way he downplays<\/a> (like former Trump strategist Steve Bannon<\/a>) White supremacists as a mere aberration, a virtually nonexistent threat, despite Dylan Roof and, later, Charlottesville. Stone suggests this discriminatory treatment (supporting a collective crackdown on unauthorized immigrants for harms caused by a minority among them, while treating violent White supremacists as outliers) is justified by comparing the two groups\u2019 crime volumes<\/em>. Yet this suggestion is nonsensical, since both populations are clearly incommensurate with one another, in terms of both membership<\/a> numbers<\/a> and elementary facts of moral decency. (We ought not to have to spell out the latter: the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants breaks immigration laws to join their families, find jobs, or request humanitarian protection; the totality of White supremacists, by definition, seeks the subjugation, cleansing, or annihilation, of their fellow human beings.)<\/p>\n Above all, this form of thinking is self-fulfilling; it encourages further criminalizing immigration. In fact, since at least the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, U.S. immigration has become hyper<\/em>-criminalized. Not only has the range of minor crimes for which legal<\/em> immigrants can be deported been expanded<\/a>; relatively benign violations like illegal entry are now being criminally prosecuted with brutal<\/a> disregard to the circumstances of and the consequences to the defendants and their families. In addition, immigration authorities routinely tag the \u201ccriminal alien<\/a>\u201d trope on unauthorized immigrants who are simply arrested but have not been convicted of any crime. And criminal enforcement tools are being turned on civil<\/em> immigration violators without also granting them the statutes of limitations<\/a>, procedural benefits and rehabilitative or restorative opportunities which actual violent offenders are normally\u2014and appropriately\u2014afforded.<\/p>\n But perhaps this administration\u2019s increasingly spectacular abuses of power\u2014whether mitigated or aggravated by its ineptitude\u2014might trigger just enough backlash to inspire a legislative re-decriminalization<\/a> of irregular border crossings, especially by asylum seekers (who, after all, are fleeing<\/em> persecution by the most rudimentary means, not leisurely touring their way to the nearest port of entry). At a more nuanced level, there might be no better time to reexamine the unquestioned policy presuppositions that supported the last legislative push for \u201ccrimmigration\u201d\u2014like the notion that public safety is well-served by deporting most categories of immigrants who have<\/em> been convicted of serious crimes but <\/em>have purged their full criminal sentences or been out on probation. Specifically, the outrageous success of Trumpism might, counterintuitively, justify asking again when deporting people to avoid the potential social risks and costs of reinsertion or of failed rehabilitation, for example, is really<\/em> a legitimate<\/a> consequence of their lacking the acceptable privileges of citizenship<\/a>.<\/p>\n