The Post "demolishes" a Trump immigration claim Trump never made

“If you get people asking the wrong questions, you don’t have to worry about the answers” --Hunter S. Thompson  

I see the Washington Post's "Wonkblog" has set out to "demolish" the Trump position that immigration is associated with crime. Right from the start, "demolition" seems a curious goal for a "wonk," by the name of Christopher Ingraham, whose interest is supposed to be about facts and figures. Yet Mr. Ingraham don't even begin with numbers. What instead is his purely factual starting point? It is Trump's "notion that immigrants here illegally commit more crime." This "notion," of course, is the Post's headline, not Trump's actual words. What is the source of the Post's claim about Trump's "notion"? It is the White House's "alarmist accounts" and "exaggerated [] threat[s]," including about MS-13. 

If you're like to accept the Post's framing of the question then you don't even need to hear the answer. 

Anyway, the Post wonk sets out to "demolish" Trump's supposed "notion" by positing immigrants commit far fewer crimes than native-born citizens. 

Pardon me, that is not quite right. The precise conclusion of the Cato study covered in the piece is that fewer immigrants were "convicted" of crimes in 2015 in Texas. Apparently researchers looked at data submitted by Texas prosecutors about their criminal cases. But do we know how many total victims there were? Do we know how many charges were successfully prosecuted against each criminal? Do we know how many victims each crime created? The wonkperson's reporting does not indicate. 

Obviously, innocent citizens have as much to fear from a single criminal who perpetrates multiple or repeated crimes than multiple offenders who perpetrate a single crime on a single occasion. Moreover, certain groups can be particularly victimized: Brussels Jews had their Purim festival canceled in 2016 because of security concerns. Such measures might help keep immigrant crime stats down, but where on the ledgers are these special costs entered? Without it, there is no way to "demolish" citizens' fears, or Trump's prescriptions for them. It seems "demolition" may need to wait. 

And what do we know of the number of immigrant crimes that are reported -- or underreported? I see this question has been vexing research of the issue for many years, confounding attempts to understand the issue. The MS-13 gang began as an outgrowth of underreported immigrant crime: Los Angeles immigrants from El Salvador in the 1980s formed the gang to protect themselves from fellow-immigrant predators there. And how have law enforcement attitudes changed since then? Just a New Year's celebration ago the world saw that a mass sexual assault could be covered up by every organ of the state. If that's progress, say the half of America that elected Trump, include us out. 

Despite the sympathy of the host country's leadership to immigrant communities, PolitiFact tells us our "overall understanding of immigrants and crime 'remains confused.'" We still don't know how often immigrants fail to report crime, or why. PolitiFact also tells us "incarceration rates are a poor way to measure links between immigrants and crime." 

The sappers may need to resolve this internecine feud before they get to work "demolishing" the President's claims. 

Back to the Post piece. Immigrants, whether documented or no, according to studies that apparently focus on the number of criminals rather than the number of crimes -- and which apparently do not account for underreporting -- are actually more law-abiding than native-born citizens. Is this meant to be any more surprising than the well-accepted assumption that airline passengers are more law-abiding than the general population? And yet to my knowledge the Wonkblog has never undertook to demolish policies for airline security or chastised "alarmist accounts" of terrorists' attempts -- successful and otherwise -- to hijack and blowup planes. To the contrary, it is firmly accepted that criminals who get on airplanes are punching above their weight. Why isn't it even considered remotely plausible, let alone accepted, that foreign criminals who cross our border are punching above their weight? On what purely scientific basis is immigrant crime deemed to be no more frightful or alarming than native-born crime? 

How do we check the fact-checkers' values? 

Perhaps it is plausible that, if we assume the immigrant is law-abiding, the immigrant will remain law-abiding: why make the arduous journey only to piss it away on a life of crime? But it is equally plausible that, if we assume the immigrant is, say, an MS-13 gang member at the time of entry, we might likewise presume the immigrant will remain a criminal menace once here. MS-13 produces many more victims, and with much greater brutality, than the average native-born criminal does. This would suggest the conclusion it may well be reasonable to conduct some sorting before allowing in an undifferentiated mass of people, even assuming they are on average a more law-abiding bunch than the current cohort. We have no less need to sort immigrants than we do airplane passengers. Assuming the average decency of a cohort of people does not excuse us from preventing the great risks that may be created by a small subset. 

So the most we can conclude so far from the Post piece is that an effective open-borders policy does not create a greater number of criminals, even if it tells us nothing about the total effects these criminals are having on Americans. 

And what about the immigrants' children? PolitiFact also tells us crime does spike among the children of immigrants. A state official concurs: 

""We're talking about third- and fourth-generation [immigrants]; these youngsters are born in Belgium, even their fathers and mothers are born in Belgium, and still they are open for these kind of messages. This is not normal -- in the U.S., the second generation was the President; here, the fourth generation is an IS fighter -- so that is really something we have to work on."" 

Do you object to my citing the Belgian Interior Minister? Why? Do you assume immigrants are unequal in their capacity to become good citizens? Do you assume that countries are unequal in their ability to assimilate immigrants? One of the greatest experimental scientists of Francis Bacon's time, William Harvey, said science was more than merely making observations -- "the vital factor of judgment [is] about what to observe and what to pay attention to." Are the Washington Post or other mainstream news sources providing reporting that meaningfully probes these basic assumptions underlying immigration? Or do you think they are leaving out something important? And do you think this omission is sending readers to other sources, including President Trump, to support these plausible and existentially relevant assumptions? 

Why isn't Congress getting more done?

Over at Instapundit Ed Driscoll asks why Congress isn't getting more done. The GOP holds the presidency, the House and the Senate (although the Senate only by a very thin 2-vote margin). So, why isn't there more legislative action? I propose a four-part explanation for why Congress wasn't ramped up and reading to go with a set of reform bills once President Trump was sworn into office:

Why weren't the bills lined up and ready to go? Three reasons: expectations, time, focus and desire. Expectations: because the GOP establishment/insiders/leadership thought Trump would lose and didn't want to waste the time to put together a positive legislative agenda when their strategy was going to be more meaningless repeal votes and jamming legislative action on what they thought would be President HRC's agenda. 

Time: it takes months and months to draft a significant piece of legislation, and years to put together a thoughtful sequence of legislative pieces that work together to advance a coherent agenda. Trump's economic agenda, whatever its inadequacies, is coherent: defend American markets from overburdensome taxation, regulation and trade policies. Now, he might be all wrong about how to do that -- he might be completely wrong about the nature of the problems facing the American economy. But his agenda, given its assumptions, is coherent. Legislatively crafting that agenda -- coordinating all the moving parts -- to get it done in the first 100 days or even the first 1000 days would have required the legislative drafting to begin at least a year or two prior to the election. Nobody was thinking that far ahead at that point, not Trump, and certainly not the GOP establishment/insiders/leadership. 

Focus: Trump's team has been distracted since he won the election, both by the breadth of what it is working on and by the media assault that it is under 24/7. Reagan understood, when he came into office, that even if he was a 2 term president he would only really get 4 or 5 things done. So, he focused like a laser beam on those 4 or 5 things: tax cuts/reform, regulatory reform, putting the Soviet Union on the read to extinction, SDI (arguably a sub-set of his Soviet policy), and getting better judges appointed to the judiciary. And even Reagan's success on those 4 or 5 things was mixed (cough, Justice O'Conner, cough, Justice Kennedy, cough). When Reagan got distracted, bad things happened (Lebanon, Iran-Contra, the illegal immigrant amnesty). The point being, Reagan wanted to fix 1000 things and had to settle for ... addressing 4 or 5 things. Trump wants to fix 1000 things and is trying to fix 1000 things. He needs to prioritize. When he does (Gorsuch, regulatory reform) he gets results. When he doesn't (everything else), he stalls.

Desire: the GOP establishment very much wants Trump to fail. Mosts of those folks are part of the open borders-free trade globalization elite that very much would like to see the United States become more fully integrated into trans-national trading blocs -- at the cost of the nation's sovereignty and the prosperity of most of our people. Trump's campaign and administration thus far have been a solid repudiation of the globalization ethos. Trump is an American nationalist, as his inaugural address made clear. The GOP congressional leadership and the people who run the party are ... not. 

St. John Paul II on the error of making politics a "secular religion"

"Moreover, man, who was created for freedom, bears within himself the wound of original sin, which constantly draws him towards evil and puts him in need of redemption. Not only is this doctrine an integral part of Christian revelation; it also has great hermeneutical value insofar as it helps one to understand human reality. Man tends towards good, but he is also capable of evil. He can transcend his immediate interest and still remain bound to it. The social order will be all the more stable, the more it takes this fact into account and does not place in opposition personal interest and the interests of society as a whole, but rather seeks ways to bring them into fruitful harmony. In fact, where self-interest is violently suppressed, it is replaced by a burdensome system of bureaucratic control which dries up the wellsprings of initiative and creativity. When people think they possess the secret of a perfect social organization which makes evil impossible, they also think that they can use any means, including violence and deceit, in order to bring that organization into being. Politics then becomes a "secular religion" which operates under the illusion of creating paradise in this world. But no political society — which possesses its own autonomy and laws55 — can ever be confused with the Kingdom of God. The Gospel parable of the weeds among the wheat (cf. Mt 13:24-30; 36-43) teaches that it is for God alone to separate the subjects of the Kingdom from the subjects of the Evil One, and that this judgment will take place at the end of time. By presuming to anticipate judgment here and now, man puts himself in the place of God and sets himself against the patience of God."

-- Centesimus Annus (May 1, 1991).