Paul Krugman: Sex trafficking, lies and immigration – 03/12/2024 – Paul Krugman

Last Thursday, Alabama senator Katie Britt gave a response on behalf of the Republicans to the State of the Union address. Her over-the-top performance was widely mocked; That’s acceptable for late-night TV, but I’m not joining that chorus.

What I want to do is focus on the central point of Britt’s comments, a deeply misleading story about human trafficking that she used to attack President Biden.

The use of the story – which turned out to involve events in Mexico way back when George W. Bush was president – was not technically a lie, as it did not explicitly say it took place in the United States during Biden’s term. However, she said, “We would not be okay with this happening in a third world country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time that we act 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 suggests that she knew she was being deceptive and wanted a way out if anyone challenged her.

To truly understand the importance of his lie, however, we need to place it in a political context.

In recent months, there has been a palpable shift in Republican rhetoric away from Biden’s attacks on the economy and toward stark warnings about “immigrant crime.”

This shift was in part forced by the fact that Biden’s economy is actually doing very well these days, with inflation receding while unemployment remains near a 50-year low. In political terms, the narrative of a bad economy appears to be fading.

If I were a Republican strategist, I would be especially concerned about the shift in tone in news coverage. The San Francisco Fed maintains a daily “news sentiment” index. In the summer of 2023, although the economy was doing very well, this rate was approximately as low as it was in the depths of the Great Recession. Since then, however, it has risen to levels roughly comparable to those that prevailed on the eve of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Republicans, then, need a new problem. And there actually appears to have 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 maximize the fear factor by blocking bipartisan legislation that would have helped secure the border.

My assumption, however, is that Trump’s speeches about immigrant crime are not purely strategic. He has a history of obsessing over alleged crimes involving dark-skinned people, even going so far as to call for the death penalty to be reinstated, following the arrests of five people in the Central Park case. And his claims about the dangers posed by immigrants are so extreme that they may well be self-defeating.

The other day, for example, he declared: “I will stop the murders, I will stop the bloodshed, I will end the agony of our people, the sacking of our cities, the rape of our citizens and the conquest of our country .” Which towns and cities, exactly, were looted and pillaged? Did Attila the Hun stop by while I wasn’t looking?

Yes, figuring out how best to secure our borders is a real issue, but the data simply doesn’t show that there is an immigrant crime crisis. In fact, homicides in America rose in 2020 — a year when Trump was still president and apprehensions at the southern border were very low. In contrast, in recent years, the homicide rate has declined even as border activity has increased.

So what do you do when the numbers don’t support your dystopian fantasies? You focus on the most horrific individual stories.

Without a doubt, the murder of Laken Riley, for which an unidentified immigrant was accused, is devastating. But in a country as large as ours, you can almost always find examples of unspeakable tragedies involving individual members of whatever group you name.

There are probably more than 10 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Based on available evidence, however, immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes.

Either way, the wave of immigrant crime — the “looting of our cities” that Trump seems incessantly to lament — is a myth. But it may be a myth that Trump believes, and the possibility that in this case he may actually be sincere is alarming.

Why? Because if Trump truly believes that immigrants are an existential threat, if he wins in November, as president, he could move forward with his plan to carry out large-scale raids and mass deportations, most likely catching many people who simply appear to be immigrants. without documentation.

So don’t dismiss Britt’s comments as a mere example of bad acting. They could be the harbinger of a reign of terror that will wreak havoc on America.

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