Fox News' "migrant crime" hysteria is a sign of GOP weakness
When you've got nothing else, run on hate.
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The Republican Party wanted to run a 2024 election campaign on inflation and the economy. That made some sense in June 2022, when inflation was at a 40-year high of 9.1 percent. But now inflation has fallen to 3.1 percent, and unemployment has been below 4 percent for 24 months. Banging on about prices and the economy no longer seems like a winning strategy.
So the GOP has pivoted back to its standard tactics: fear-mongering, scapegoating, and bigotry.
Fox News is no longer talking about high prices 24/7. It now apparently believes the central problem of our day is … immigrant crime.
Public Notice publisher Aaron Rupar counted 27 mentions of “migrant crime” on Wednesday alone across Fox News and Fox Business. “Migrant Crime Sparks New Outrage Across US” one chyron screamed; the segment included giant mugshots of immigrant Latino men accused of crimes. Hosts hit President Biden for not discussing “migrant crime” during a speech he gave that day.
“It’s difficult to convince Americans that they are safe or becoming safer when they do not feel safe in this nation,” John Roberts proclaimed.
In trying to scare the bejesus out of people, Fox is working hand in glove with Trump, who of course has also embraced the panic, insisting that there’s a “new form of crime … migrant crime.” Trump has even encouraged his followers to call it “Biden migrant crime.” (Spoiler: there is not in fact a major uptick in migrant crime.)
Trump himself has already been president and could in theory run on his own record. But that record is thin or extremely unpopular or both. And so Fox is helping him out by pushing a lie and moral panic. Conservatives have little to offer their constituents beyond fear and the sadistic pleasure of harming those they consider their enemies.
No, migrants aren’t criminals
The conflation of migrants with crime — which of course was the theme of the speech Trump delivered launching his presidential campaign in June 2015 — has been debunked repeatedly, but it’s worth ticking through the evidence again. There’s simply no data or reputable analysis finding that migrants commit crime at a higher rate than citizens.
A 2020 Cato study of Texas found that for native-born Americans, conviction rates were 1,422 per 100,000. For undocumented immigrants, the rate was much lower — only 782 per 100,000. And for legal immigrants, the rate was 535 per 100,000. Cato found that immigrants were less likely to commit violent crimes, property crimes, homicides, and sexual assaults than people born in the United States.
A 2023 Stanford study found similar results when it looked at imprisonment rates going back to 1830. Immigrants have basically always been imprisoned at lower rates; today, they are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than people born in the US. That’s in part because Black people are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system. But even if you just look at the incarceration rates of white people born in the US, immigrants are imprisoned 30 percent less.
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No one is entirely sure why immigrant crime rates are so much lower than those of people who are born in the US. It may be because immigrants who come to the US are self-selected and especially determined to succeed and avoid prison. Immigrants may also fear deportation, and so may try to avoid doing anything that might put them in contact with the police. Whatever the reason though, the data is very clear; “migrant crime” or even “Biden migrant crime” is much, much less of a problem than crime by native-born people.
More, crime rates overall are not up. In fact, they’re down. Murder rates in 2023 fell by more than 12 percent from 2022, among the biggest recorded drops. Other violent crimes also decreased. Retailers claimed that there was a huge increase in shoplifting in the last few years — but that turns out to have been almost entirely a myth. Trump, nonetheless, has made daydreaming about police shooting shoplifters a regular part of his campaign speeches. Check out the below clip from Trump’s speech last weekend at CPAC, for example, where he muses about shoplifters being shot and says, “that's why I'm giving immunity to police.”
The GOP’s migrant crime rhetoric has no basis in fact. But it has a basis in the history of hatred. Demagogues and racists often try to link marginalized groups to crime to build power and justify violence.
The Nazis regularly claimed that Jewish people committed crimes at high rates; in the notorious propaganda film The Eternal Jew, Hitler’s propagandists made the preposterous assertion that Jewish people controlled 98 percent of prostitution worldwide. White racists in the US justified the lynching of Black people in the post-Reconstruction south with racist myths linking Black men to sexual violence against white women.
Of course, migrants do commit some crimes. In a country with some 45 million immigrants, it’s easy to find a handful of mugshots to put on your screen. But the scare tactic is nonetheless a scare tactic; there is not a sweeping crime wave perpetrated by immigrants. To say otherwise is a lie.
Republicans are not in the business of addressing actual problems
Inflation is not a problem right now and “Biden migrant crime” is not a problem. But there are numerous real challenges facing the United States.
Mass shootings in the US have risen sharply. There has been a serious rise in homelessness. Covid continues to kill — more than 73,000 people died of the disease in 2023. College costs are high, and student loan debt remains a brutal burden for many people in the US. The US continues to be the only wealthy country that does not guarantee health care to its residents. Reproductive health care in the US in particular is in crisis after the Dobbs decision gutting abortion rights. Biden’s support for Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza, which has quickly become a humanitarian disaster, is unpopular with the Democratic base. There’s a lot to admire in Biden’s record, but a good faith opposition could find substantive things to criticize him for.
The difficulty for Republicans, of course, is that these issues are all ones that they don’t want to talk about, or which they are actively working to make worse. Trump has deliberately taken an even more pro-Israel, anti-Palestinian stance than Biden. The GOP is strongly opposed to gun control laws, despite evidence that restrictions on large-capacity magazines can reduce deaths in mass shootings.
The right has also set itself against student debt relief. It opposes policies like the expanded child tax credit, which substantially reduced child poverty and could well help many families struggling with homelessness. And of course the GOP’s rabid anti-abortion stance is the cause of the current crisis in reproductive health care, Trump’s occasional unconvincing efforts to appear as an abortion moderate notwithstanding.
Even in the rare cases where Trump could tout his achievements, he’s reluctant to do so. Trump does deserve credit for Operation Warp Speed, the initiative to quickly develop a Covid vaccine. It may have saved 140,000 lives in the US. Covid denialism is so overwhelming in the GOP now, though, that Trump has admitted he avoids discussing even the upsides of his record.
“I really don’t want to talk about it, because, as a Republican, it’s not a great thing to talk about, because, for some reason, it’s just not,” he said of covid vaccines last year.
To the extent Republicans have actual policy goals — like reducing taxes on the rich or ending abortion rights — those goals are extremely unpopular. So the GOP abandons reality and embraces racist conspiracy theory nonsense.
They’ve done this repeatedly in recent elections cycles. In 2018, Trump and Fox News fear-mongered about a migrant caravan they claimed was going to flood over the US southern border; the “issue” was abandoned after the election (which the GOP lost). In 2020, following the George Floyd protests, Trump tried to claim (falsely) that Democratic-led cities had devolved into chaos and crime. Again, that tactic was a loser.
Hate may not be an effective strategy. But it’s still harmful.
As the GOP record of electoral defeat in the Trump years make clear, scaring your base with fake problems rather than addressing real ones is not a great political strategy. Among other things, people who aren’t already committed MAGAs aren’t likely to believe you when you tell them that they should worry about nonsense when they have real problems (like health care and student debt) that you actively refuse to help them with.
But conspiracy theories and hatred do, nonetheless, have real and dangerous effects. Just ahead of the 2018 midterms, the migrant caravan panic was directly cited by the Tree of Life synagogue shooter, who committed the worst antisemitic massacre in US history. The right’s demonization of immigrants has led to a spike in hate crimes against Latinos.
Fox’s obsession with migrant crime is the strategy of a post-policy Republican Party that is intellectually and morally bankrupt. It’s a sign of weakness, not strength. But that weakness, and that hatred, can still do a lot of harm. It will do even more if, despite itself, the GOP manages to win in November.
That’s it for this week
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We’ll be back with more Monday. Until then, have a great weekend.
I knew he Republican’s claims of high migrant crime lacked evidence but now I know there is considerable recent evidence that it is FALSE. Well done. I pay my subscriptions to support reporting/analysis like this. All I can say is that in Australia a major party who ran these untruths would be hounded by the media when-ever they spoke of it in a press conference.
American style ‘free speech’ laws have ruined the media landscape and are made it a clear and present danger to democratic practice now that Murdoch has discovered that spouting round the clock lies and untruths can be commercially viable. Fox news employees ought to be shunned like those who consort themselves with mobsters and ‘successful’ criminals.
PS Respect and sympathy to Aaron for counting 27 mentions of ‘migrant crime’ in Fox TV over a day. Good to see that he’s on the job even if he’s not writing as often as I’d like.
PPS My apologies to all Americans that we Australians exported Rupert Murdoch to you.
"The only thing we have to fear, is fear-mongering by the right-wing media."