Math v. Drama: Inflated Immigration Trauma

If anyone has read my posts over the last several years, I often return to the issue of immigration. For me, it's important because within all the politics we tend to miss real human factors. I also hold to three views on immigration that make me welcoming of immigrants to the United States. First, history motivates my positions. On one hand, history shows that people have historically migrated as a means of survival, be that in times of droughts, famine, war, economic need, and climate emergencies. On the other hand, more recently, people migrated to the United States because of liberty; at least up until demonstrably racist laws began to limit and prohibit movement starting in the late nineteenth century.

Secondly, philosophically -- following the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' Enlightenment philosophies on liberty -- I believe that the freedom of movement is as inalienable (because of my historical view) as are our rights to free speech, property, and defense. The idea of restrictive borders that partly exist to keep immigrants out is foreign to both history (nation-state borders were not a thing until relatively recently... borders were treated much differently throughout human history as demarcating generalized areas of reign and not impasses) and the philosophy of free movement. 

Lastly, I have religious convictions that posit that God made the whole earth and he told people to fill it. It isn't our prerogative to limit it so severely. While borders existed to demarcate lands various peoples lived in and their governing, they were much less defined, largely open to movement (though travelers were often expected to honor the precepts of the land and pay tribute), and settle-able. Look at Lot in the book Genesis (19:9). He was a foreigner in Sodom, but was expected by the city to abide by the whims of the people, though they were against God's will. Generally, migrants could expect to settle anywhere in the world in history, so long as they either paid tribute to the local authorities or abided by the laws of the land in order to stay (see Number 15:30). In may ways, this is how cultures grew and evolved. Trade was also increased this way. The Greeks and Phoenicians, for example, had trade outposts as far as Spain. 

Anyway, nationalist views of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries tend to exclude. In order to make such arguments, immigrants need to be othered or marginalized through dehumanizing rhetoric -- language that focuses on the minutia for the whole or mischaracterizes people-groups, such as calling them invaders or criminals. The focus is also a numbers game. For example, in 2022, 12, 028 criminal illegal aliens were arrested by Customs and Border Protection (LINK), which was up dramatically from the 2,438 in 2020. Proponents of strict immigration controls will point out that the increase means that there are more criminal immigrants, which is a skewed approach. It could just as easily mean that CBP personnel are doing their jobs better. Plus, 2020 was the time COVID-19 shut down the border. Or it could be correlative to increased waves of migrations from authoritarian nations. Regardless, it is an increase in arrests, but not necessarily an increase in immigrant crime rates per capita. Statistics still show that immigrants, both legal and illegal, are less than likely to commit serious crimes than domestic born Americans. 

The numbers are also skewed in another way. We can focus on 12, 028 criminal arrests of immigrants for 2022, but the total apprehensions at the border (including non serious violations or simple crossing violations) was 2, 766, 582 (2.3 million at the SW border alone: LINK). The serious criminal arrests were less than half a percent of that number. This in no ways suggests that the serious crimes ought to be discounted, but it's significantly low compared to the total numbers crossing the border. Yet, nationalists use the minutia to marginalize the overwhelming majority. It's pure rhetoric and is simply cruel.  It is a matter of math versus the drama of scare tactics. It creates an inflated sense of drama that actually discounts liberty. The truth is that migrants pose no significantly more severe risk than our own citizens. We need to change our approach in the conversation.