Friday, December 11, 2015

Chidike Okeem ― The Odious Xenophobia of Donald Trump

Without the courage to call out people like Trump with verve, the GOP will always struggle to win minority votes—particularly given they are contending with a Democratic Party that does not presently traffic in, or have politicians who are rewarded for engaging in, such plainly bigoted rhetoric.



via VOICEOFCHID.COM

The notion that immigrants increase crime rates is not supported by the facts and is scoffed at by criminologists worth their salt. In a 2013 chapter published in the Oxford Handbook of Ethnicity, Crime, and Immigration, criminologists Ramiro Martinez, Jr. and Kimberly Mehlman-Orozco point out that not only is it a myth that immigrants increase violent crime, but first-generation immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born populations. Addressing the tendency of people in the chattering class to ignore criminological research in favor of unlettered compilations of anecdotes favoring the “criminal immigrant” hypothesis, the professors write: “The images of the hyper[-]violent criminal immigrant and violence-prone immigrant communities survive in many circles. They persist among many politicians, pundits, policy makers, and segments of the general population despite the existence of strong, consistent evidence that more immigrants do not mean more violent crime.” Multivariate analyses of crime rates in big cities conducted by trained criminologists are far more valuable than white supremacists’ crazed anti-immigrant fantasies.

White supremacists who endlessly promote the myth of overwhelming immigrant and minority crime are tendentiously fastidious about avoiding every positive about immigrants and minorities. After trashing Mexican immigrants, Trump said, “…and some, I assume, are good people.” Oddly, he did not elaborate on the good that Mexicans do for America, but he was very specific about the rapists and criminals. It is also curious that so much of the anti-Mexican hysteria is being hyped now when Mexican immigration is declining. According to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese and Indian immigrants are now immigrating to the United States more than Mexicans. Also, fascinatingly, according to Geoscape, Latino-owned businesses in the United States are proliferating at an impressively fast rate. Since 2007, Latino businesses have grown by 43 percent—more than double of the growth rate of businesses in the general population. This does not fit the favored nativist narrative of Hispanics in the United States being nothing more than shiftless, welfare-dependent slobs who are only in the country to mooch off the American taxpayer and commit violent crime.

Read the full article HERE.