The myth of migrant crime


On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver debunks the false narrative heavily promoted by serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) and right wing media like Fox news that the US is awash in a crime wave being committed by migrants. He shows that crime rates have declined dramatically over recent years and that migrants are much less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, and that a few events that have been shown repeatedly as examples of this rampant lawlessness in fact show no such thing.

This show was aired last Sunday, before Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race, but Oliver’s plea at the end about the importance of voting against SSACFT, whatever our reservations and concerns about Biden, are still valid.

Comments

  1. birgerjohansson says

    Well, the Trump family are ultimately migrants from Germany. And a big part of the South was settled by people from the economic periphery of Britain. As for the North it was primarily settled by immigrants from the land of upper-class twits and their minions, the most dangerous and destructive demographic of western europe.
    .
    -Crime was already decreasing in the nineties, while lawmakers were introducing draconian laws to curb a crime wave that existed the way god exists -- in people’s brains. This is how a lot of politics work, in USA and abroad.

  2. Pierce R. Butler says

    We should, however, take due note of the harm done to the US by immigrant South African Elon Musk and immigrant Australians Ken Ham and the Murdoch clan, not to mention intermittent Brit tourist Nigel Farage.

    Note also the damage wrought by USAians elsewhere. Aside from the CIA & military, Interpol needs a shoot-on-sight notice for Erik Prince and the Tate brothers, for starters.

  3. Bekenstein Bound says

    Video embed noworky. In fact this has happened frequently on this specific blog.

    Also, does anyone know how you get a perpetual login on this site? Even if I tick “remember me” it doesn’t stay logged in for longer than a few days at a stretch!

  4. Katydid says

    @1: that’s a gross overstatement. Pennsylvania, for example, has a mixed population including Italians, Welsh, and Irish who worked in the mines and the factories. There’s also a lot of Amish and Mennonites, and a significant Hispanic population who came to work the farms and ended up buying many of them.

    Northeastern New Jersey is a composite like New York City.

    New York City is a melting pot of the world’s population, and the rust belt areas tend to skew Irish, Italian, Polish, and Greek.

    Massachusetts was home to any number of textile factories and employed wave after wave of Polish, German, Portuguese, Irish, and Italian immigrants, plus a solid Asian population. Boston is another melting pot like New York City.

    Rhode Island has a high proportion of Portuguese, Irish, and Italian immigrants, now in their fifth or sixth generation.

    It’s not until you get to New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine that the populations skews heavily Anglo-Saxon.

  5. Matt G says

    Since when have repubs let facts get in the way of their preferred narrative? And what’s surprising about them targeting one of the demographic groups least able to respond to this slander?

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