#& also i live in an area w/a high latino population and i did in high school too

[semiconducting]

my 2 cents that no one asked for but sometimes i see ethnicity hcs for the td characters and i notice that a lot of ppl hc courtney as mixed latina and asian of some variety (usually south asian, somehow specifically bengali which piqued my interest...as a bengali) but i remember that it was around tdas or something that fresh posted these like. bios or some shit and they like Forgot that courtney was previously stated to be latina n listed her as asian. or maybe it was a tweet from tom mcgillis or smth i don't remember exactly but! i get now these days ppl are like oh just make her Mixed. All Canon! and if i were to have gotten into total drama post-tdas i probably would say the same HOWEVER. AS A SOUTH ASIAN i dont like south asian courtney she's fully latina to me and that's how i've always seen her i can't change it

[sumukhcomedy]

A Brown Man in Rural America

I split time between living in Los Angeles and the plains of Colorado from 2017 to 2020. Given the circumstances in America, this gave me a particularly unique experience. I lived amidst the supposed “Hollywood elite” and liberalism of Los Angeles and also the supposed backwards MAGA-loving world of rural America. I also am a Brown-skinned man, which provides an additional unique experience in both environments.

I grew up in suburban Cleveland. I went to college in the town of Oxford in Southwest Ohio. I lived in my 20s in downtown Columbus. Being a stand-up comedian out of Columbus gave me the opportunity to perform in towns I would not have otherwise known even existed not just in Ohio but in many states across the country. It prepared me for all possibilities in my existence. After one show, a man in the audience casually told myself and a fellow comedian (who is Black) about the sundown hours that were still on the books in the town. We slowly and politely got the hell out of there.

In general, my experience in rural America, much like Los Angeles and any other place I’ve lived, was good. Our home was remote and so our nearest neighbors were a half a mile away from us. My interactions with them were fine if we would even see each other. There was a wave and a smile and perhaps a quick conversation. The philosophy was pretty clear: you do your own thing and you’re left alone. And, if you haven’t gotten to know me at all, then you’ll know that I’m good with that philosophy. There still, though, was a sense of community. When it would snow (which could be heavy and lead to drifting with the high winds of the Plains), a neighbor would come by to plow everyone’s driveways. We’d make Christmas cookies each year for our neighbors. It’s not as if there wasn’t interaction, awareness, and general positivity.

I work from my home and so I obviously did not work in any of the neighboring towns or even was reliant on the local economy. What limited interactions I had were at my favorite places in town: the gym, the hardware stores, and the veterinarian’s office. Again, it was all generally seemingly positive. But, let’s be clear as well: I was a Brown man who looked more Arab than Latino (the only other racial minority population within this community) so I knew that I stood out. I mean, the census taker said she’d “seen me around town” even though we’d never met before.

As a stand-up comedian, I am of course a bit insane and so I often would do early morning running in my “neighborhood.” This would be long stretches of miles of running on gravel roads with usually no one but rabbits and deer around. But, on occasion, a truck might pass by. One time, a neighbor who had never met me before, slowed his truck down and asked, “Are you lost?” I chuckled and explained to him that I lived in the area and where I lived and then he understood and the conversation was pleasant. But, of course, the mind escapes to Ahmaud Arbery and similar such situations where no matter where you are in the country, as a person of color, you are vulnerable. And, it’s more so even possible here as the only person of color that stands out in an area where I’m well aware every one of my neighbors owns a gun.

We often harp on the differences between urban spaces and rural areas and the people within them. In some cases, these differences are warranted. In others, they are not. And, most likely, the differences are still just wrinkles in how our country and society as a whole operate. For example, the challenges of a person of color in Los Angeles as opposed to the Plains of Colorado are different but they are still extensions of the same overall societal issue. In the example I gave, some random person could clearly kill me while I was running in Los Angeles. However, I feel that it is at least a major city in Los Angeles with a diverse population and vocal individuals towards injustice. Even if I am dead, much like the many number of people of color who have died in such a manner, there is a large population that will speak to the injustice and that are fighting to ensure such an act will not be repeated again. There’s still a certain safety in an otherwise unsafe environment.

In rural America, this isn’t the case for the person of color. To begin with, I am already an outsider. I did not grow up in this town nor this area and towns like this still do rely heavily on “legacy families.” As such, they operate in a certain way based off the history of the town. Let’s also add to that a history of racism in this country, that I stand out as a person of color in a predominantly white area, and that there are no others really to defend me on any possible sense of injustice. I don’t have the connections to be cared for whether just generally as a person let alone as a person of color.

Following the death of George Floyd and the rise of people actually caring about Black Lives Matter, that was my biggest concern. There were so many areas of the country where not only were people of color at a higher potential for experiencing backlash but they also may not have any support system to prevent them from that backlash.

2020 was a complicated year for many reasons but, for the sake of my family and personal and work decisions that were great opportunities and best suited us, we moved from the Plains of Colorado. A part of me did not want to leave because I did enjoy the peace and solitude of the area. A part of me also felt guilty because I felt as if I was leaving behind an area I was at least in for 3 years and had some kind of mild impact on. I mean, I think I can say confidently that I was the “Colorado Plains Comedy Scene” and the one show we organized did generate $1100 for mental health services in the area.

When I reflect on my opportunities to live in such spaces, I can’t help but look at the downfall of both urban settings and rural settings and the gridlock over pride, politics, and insults that make the conversation between these areas so terrible. It’s why President Joe Biden preaches “unity” but why I roll my eyes at such a simplistic concept. Let us admit: Los Angeles and the major cities have problems and rural America has problems. If we coalesce and be honest and listen to each other and improve them, we make the country better as a whole. Unfortunately, we’ve allowed ourselves to not actually look and explain facts and history to make it better.

In Los Angeles, a city with a terrible history on race and police brutality, it is no surprise that the focus is on the treatment of authority towards people of color. This does not hit home nor is relevant to rural America, which prides itself on its police and law being a part of its protection and its community. But, when your rural community has next to no people of color, how can you really understand the battle on the issue that exists within the major cities? This is why it was very easy to spin to Republicans and most of rural America that Black Lives Matter protesters were rioters and destroying property which was clearly rare or, in the cases that it did happen, an escalation of the pressure of years of racism in a specific city.

In rural America, while there may have been protests (one I even participated in), the effects can’t possibly have the same impact when the intimidation of the Blue Lives Matter/All Lives Matter crowd was far more prevalent. We could protest but we better be as peaceful as we possibly can be or these people could kill us. Even then, they may kill us even just for protesting. This is the significant difference of being of color in rural America as opposed to the metropolitan city.

But, on the other hand, what appears to fuel rural America’s anger is the determination that the major cities or the Democrats or whomever are inflicting their ways upon that area. To some extent, this is understandable. The community that I lived in was entirely reliant upon farming and agriculture. Who the hell am I to say how their farms should run or what is best for them? But, at the same time, Trump became the first sitting president in 27 years to personally attend and speak at the Future Farmers of America conference in 2018. As a person of color, we often speak of representation and awareness, and if as a farmer you get that from the President of the United States, it’s understandable how you find yourself connecting and aligning with him. We can sit back and debate over Trump, the trade war, subsidies, and farming, but that isn’t what I want to get into. The Democrats failed in the simple step with farmers of just acknowledgment over a long period of time.

President Biden can preach “unity” but it is far more complex to unite these states of America at this point. One of the great difficulties that I had with rural America and social media was people’s strong ability to be swayed by memes, conspiracy theories, and other notions that were just not based in fact but fit the perspective they wanted. It’s not as if everyone within social media isn’t possibly affected by that in some way no matter their perspective but it’s certainly magnified in these communities and in right-wing environments. On the rare occasion I may discuss political issues with someone in the area, it would be with a person that I had met before, and had seemingly found a good and positive relationship with. And, yet, often they would find themselves defending their perspective constantly. Rather than listening, they just kept talking. They would rather believe memes, videos, and the Internet than a person they’d actually met and my experiences. It didn’t make me happy because that is not how I would handle a similar situation. If they wanted to talk to me about farming, I’d listen to them on it. I wouldn’t spew knowledge I heard from some random YouTube clip as what are the facts specific to their situation and perspective.

And, so, this is the great disconnect that we deal with. We can’t have unity unless there is a battle to change the anger and how people are gaining their knowledge, thoughts, and perspectives. Whether it was masks or social justice or Jeffrey Epstein, the 2020s have gone off the rails in how people gain their information and their mindsets. And, from what I can tell, it’s getting more and more extensively bad in both the secluded rural environments and in the major cities. It’s just that each has its own challenges and each also wants to give their opinions and insult the other on the issues.

So, what’s my point? I’ve been critical of Los Angeles on its issues like gentrification. I’ve been critical with Trump supporters on their issues. No area of this country or its people are perfect and yet they purport themselves to have the right perspective with such certainty for whatever reason. And such certainty only gets magnified either via social media or media outlets looking to raise controversy rather than journalistic integrity.

Whether it be the urban space or the rural space of America, the person of color is in a sort of prison, its levels of that Panopticon dependent upon the environment. We do what we have to do to survive in a society that operates in a certain way. I have clutched my hands on my steering wheel when pulled over by police in the predominantly Black neighborhood of Franklin Park in Columbus, Ohio and on a highway outside Sidney, Nebraska. I’m as polite as I can be as a Brown man in a place where I’m self-aware I am a Brown man either in a city that inflicts pain upon about Brown and Black men or on a rural area that has no Brown men. 

Sure, I can describe my experiences as “good” from the towns I’ve performed or lived in to the largest cities in America I’ve performed or lived in. But the big question is one that will always linger until change occurs: do people of color feel as safe in any of these environments as white people do?

[troger]

How Trump Grew His Support Among Latinos

He understood what motivated his voters, and he made sure they knew he did.

Geraldo L. Cadava

History professor at Northwestern University

Latinos are not a uniform voting bloc. We are spread across the country and have wildly different backgrounds. Over the years, Latinos ourselves have struggled to articulate what unites and divides us. The first question I ask in my Latino History course at Northwestern University is “Who, or what, is a ‘Latino’ anyway?” The class never resolves the question, but the students go back to it over and over as they study the evolving conceptions of Latinos.

We are so diverse that we often say the “Latino vote” doesn’t really exist. Yet certain trends emerge when you look closely at the voting preferences of our motley demographic. According to my calculations based on early exit polls, almost 60 percent of eligible Latinos voted this year—more than 19 million voters—compared with about 50 percent in prior elections. That turnout means that a huge number voted for Joe Biden, but also that a large number voted for Donald Trump. Trump earned 28 percent of Latino votes in 2016 and approximately 32 percent in 2020. He was able to expand his support not only in southern Florida, where many typically conservative Cuban Americans live, but also among Latinos of different stripes across the country—in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina, Texas, and Wisconsin.

Read: What liberals don’t understand about pro-Trump Latinos

How did a president who has continually maligned immigrants grow his portion of Latino voters? Hispanic Republicans and Latino Trump supporters are not “self-hating,” as the actor John Leguizamo and many others have argued. I’ve studied Republicans’ relationship with Latinos over the decades and have conducted many interviews with voters and political operatives during this election. The political beliefs of these voters are deeply held and sincere. Trump understood what motivated his Latino supporters—economic individualism, religious liberty, and law and order—and he made sure they knew he did.     

In almost every election since Richard Nixon’s in 1972, the Republican presidential candidate has won from a quarter to a third of the Latino vote, even as the GOP tacked right on immigration and border enforcement. In 2004, Latinos, drawn to George W. Bush’s moderation and compassion on a range of issues, including immigration and bilingual education, gave him about 40 percent of their votes. Trump was a very different candidate and president from Bush, but a sizable percentage of Latinos had come to identify as loyal Republicans, and they wouldn’t switch sides easily.

Trump’s administration built on existing Republican support by relentlessly courting Latinos since 2017, focusing on his economic policies and support for religious freedom. Even as Trump made family separation and the border wall central parts of his platform, the White House engaged Latino business owners early and often. Trump lowered taxes, slashed financial regulations, and named a Latina Small Business Administration administrator, Jovita Carranza, who helped Latino business owners. He also claimed credit in speeches for low unemployment numbers, rising rates of homeownership, and growing family incomes for Latinos, trends that started during the Barack Obama years.

While Democrats focused on Trump’s slanders, they missed a bigger picture. Take, for example, the week in early July when Goya CEO Robert Unanue’s praise of Trump resulted in calls to boycott Goya products. That week as a whole was about Trump’s relentless recruitment of Latino voters—the visit by Mexico’s president to celebrate the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement; the announcement of the Hispanic Prosperity Initiative, which promised more support for Latino business owners, charter schools, and Hispanic-serving institutions; and the meeting with Southcom, a joint military command based in Florida that’s responsible for operations in Central America, South America, and the Caribbean, during which the president promised to halt the flow of drugs from Latin America.

Trump also successfully exploited the economic frustrations of many Latinos, young and old. He clearly stated that he had answers to their problems, would help them find jobs, and would grow the economy. This rhetoric resonated with those in South Texas, a heavily Mexican American, traditionally Democratic area of the state with high rates of poverty, poor educational outcomes, and health disparities, including a particularly high rate of COVID-19 infection and mortality.

Read: The neglect of Latino voters

Republican boosters in the region talked about improved quality of life, business opportunities, and educational access to institutions such as the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Trump amplified this narrative of regional progress and gave many in the area hope. Monica De La Cruz–Hernandez, a Republican who narrowly lost her race for a congressional seat in the Rio Grande Valley, told me that Trump had helped Mexican Americans “find their voice.” Now they’re “walk-away Democrats” who shifted their support to Trump more dramatically than Latinos in other parts of the country.

Trump aggressively talked about law and order in a way that appealed particularly to Latino men in the Border Patrol, military, and police departments. In the days before the election, Latino leaders of the National Border Patrol Council expressed support for Trump’s immigration and border policies. Art Del Cueto, the council’s vice president, said, “We must continue to support the rule of the law and continue to support President Trump.” Trump also received the endorsement of the National Latino Peace Officers Association Advocacy.

The Trump administration focused on Latino churchgoers, deputizing Vice President Mike Pence to visit gatherings with Latino evangelicals and tell them that Trump was the defender of their religious liberties. Members of this religious group have deeply ingrained anti-abortion-rights beliefs, and they also responded to the administration’s support for religious charter schools and its general desire to blur the lines between religion and public life. Latino evangelicals aren’t all Republicans. One of their leaders, Gabriel Salguero, has called them classic swing voters whose political allegiance is divided. But they do support Republicans at greater rates—46 percent—than the general Latino population does.

Finally, the idea, spread through scaremongering campaigns, that most Democrats are socialists worried Latinos whose families had fled leftist-controlled governments in Latin America. Socialism was also shorthand for a range of ideas related to government overreach in healthcare, the economy, and education.  

Latinos certainly contributed to Biden’s margin of victory. The former vice president’s campaign and its pollster Latino Decisions point to the dramatic rise in Latino participation. However, the campaign has been criticized for not beginning its outreach earlier. It didn’t really start until the days before the Democratic National Convention and focused on us during Hispanic Heritage Month in the fall, despite the fact that Latino political strategists have long argued that a candidate can’t expect our support if he shows up only in the final months or weeks of a campaign.

But to believe that earlier outreach would have led to a dramatically different result is to ignore the political agency of Latino Republicans and Trump supporters. Republicans in 2024 will look to replicate Trump’s relative success among Latinos, perhaps without the racism. Democrats, meanwhile, should grapple with the reality that a growing number of Latinos voted for the Republican Party’s policies. They should engage Latinos across the country, beginning today, to understand how to better represent their preferences on issues including healthcare, education, the economy, and immigration. If Democrats hope to reverse the gains Republicans made this year, they should also pay attention to what about Trump drew Latinos in.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

Geraldo Cadava, a history professor at Northwestern University, is the author of The Hispanic Republican: The Shaping of an American Political Identity, from Nixon to Trump.

[bountyofbeads]

How Stephen Miller Rode an Anti-Immigration Wave to the White House

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/17/us/politics/stephen-miller-immigration-trump.html

How Stephen Miller Rode an Anti-Immigration Wave to the White House

Behind Mr. Miller’s singular grip on the Trump anti-immigrant agenda are forces far bigger than his own hostility toward the foreign-born.

By Jason DeParle | Published August 17, 2019 3:44 PM ET | New York Times | Posted August 17, 2019 5:44 PM ET |

WASHINGTON — When historians try to explain how opponents of immigration captured the Republican Party, they may turn to the spring of 2007, when President George W. Bush threw his waning powers behind a legalization plan and conservative populists buried it in scorn.

Mr. Bush was so taken aback, he said he worried about America “losing its soul,” and immigration politics have never been the same.

That spring was significant for another reason, too: An intense young man with wary, hooded eyes and fiercely anti-immigrant views graduated from college and began a meteoric rise as a Republican operative. With the timing of a screenplay, the man and the moment converged.

Stephen Miller was 22 and looking for work in Washington. He lacked government experience but had media appearances on talk radio and Fox News and a history of pushing causes like “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.” A first-term congresswoman from Minnesota offered him a job interview and discovered they were reading the same book: a polemic warning that Muslim immigration could mean “the end of the world as we know it.”

By the end of the interview, Representative Michele Bachmann had a new press secretary. And a dozen years later, Mr. Miller, now a senior adviser to President Trump, is presiding over one of the most fervent attacks on immigration in American history.

The story of Mr. Miller’s rise has been told with a focus on his pugnacity and paradoxes. Known more for his enemies than his friends, he is a conservative firebrand from liberal Santa Monica, Calif., and a descendant of refugees who is seeking to eliminate refugee programs. He is a Duke graduate in bespoke suits who rails against the perfidy of so-called elites. Among those who have questioned his moral fitness are his uncle, his childhood rabbi and 3,400 fellow Duke alumni.

Less attention has been paid to the forces that have abetted his rise and eroded Republican support for immigration — forces Mr. Miller has personified and advanced in a career unusually reflective of its times.

Rising fears of terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks brought new calls to keep immigrants out. Declining need for industrial labor left fewer businesses clamoring to bring them in. A surge of migrants across the South stoked a backlash in the party’s geographic base.

Conservative media, once divided, turned against immigration, and immigration-reduction groups that had operated on the margins grew in numbers and sophistication. Abandoning calls for minority outreach, the Republican Party chose instead to energize its conservative white base — heeding strategists who said the immigrant vote was not just a lost cause but an existential threat.

Arriving in Washington as these forces coalesced, Mr. Miller rode the tailwinds with zeal and skill. Warning of terrorism and disturbed by multicultural change, he became the protégé of a Southern senator especially hostile to immigration, Jeff Sessions of Alabama. And he courted allies in the conservative media and immigration-restriction groups.

Mr. Miller, who declined to comment for this article, affects the air of a lone wolf — guarded, strident, purposefully provocative. But he has been shaped by the movement whose ideas and lieutenants he helped install across the government as he consolidated a kind of power unusual for a presidential aide and unique in the Trump White House.

“I don’t agree with his policy on reducing legal immigration, but I’m in awe of how he’s been able to impact this one issue,” said Cesar Conda, who battled Mr. Miller on Capitol Hill as an aide to Senator Marco Rubio of Florida. “He’s got speech writing, he’s got policy, he’s got his own little congressional-relations operation, he’s got allies whom he’s helped place across the government.”

“Years ago, the restrictionist movement was a ragtag group” with no strong ties to either party, he added. Mr. Miller “embodies their rise into the G.O.P. mainstream.”

Country and Party in Motion

The story that has defined Mr. Miller’s life began two decades before his birth, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed a 1965 law ending quotas that chose immigrants based on their national origin and heavily favored white people from Northern Europe. Although Mr. Johnson called the new law a largely symbolic measure that would neither increase immigrants’ numbers nor alter their ethnic mix, it did both on a vast scale — raising the foreign-born share of the population to near-record highs and setting the United States on course for nonwhite Hispanics to become a majority of the population.

Opposition initially came from the left, especially from environmentalists worried about population growth.

The first major immigration-control group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, was founded in 1979 by Dr. John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist and Sierra Club member, with funding from Cordelia Scaife May, an heiress to the Mellon banking fortune. Mindful of the bigotry in earlier anti-immigration movements, Dr. Tanton vowed to keep it “centrist/liberal in political orientation.”

But his arguments about environmental harm and wage competition found little traction in a Democratic Party eager to court minorities. By the mid-1980s, Dr. Tanton was making the racial arguments he had pledged to avoid, decrying the “Latin onslaught” and insisting on the need for “a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”

How Immigrants’ Share of the Population Has Changed

Since the late 1960s, a surge of immigrants from Latin America and Asia has altered America's ethnic mix and has driven the foreign-born share of the population close to a record high.

At the time, the Republican Party was divided on immigration. While cultural conservatives were wary of rapid demographic change, businesses wanted cheap labor and Cold Warriors embraced anti-Communist refugees, including large waves of Cubans and Vietnamese. Running for president, a conservative as definitional as Ronald Reagan hailed “millions of immigrants from every corner of the earth” as a sign that God had made America a “city on a hill.”

But by the 1990s, the Cold War had ended, and globalization was sending manufacturing abroad. The business wing of the Republican Party, its main pro-immigrant faction, had less need for foreign workers. “It’s not that the business lobby became anti-immigration; it’s just that they cared a lot less,” said Margaret Peters, a political scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Where Immigrants’ Population Share Has Grown the Most

Green areas had an increase in their share of foreign-born, with darker shading signifying a larger uptick. Purple areas had a decrease.

Not least among the forces shaping the debate was immigration itself: It accelerated and spread to the South, with the number of unauthorized immigrants growing especially fast.

In 1986, President Reagan signed a compromise law that gave legal status to nearly three million people while adding new penalties to curb flows of illegal immigrants. But enforcement proved weak, and the unauthorized population reached a record 12 million. Restrictionists, feeling betrayed, swore never to allow another “amnesty.”

After a Republican backlash in the 1990s led more immigrants to vote for Democrats, Mr. Bush ran in 2000 as a pro-immigrant conservative. He saw Latinos as proto-Republican — religious, entrepreneurial, family-oriented — and was considering a legalization plan when the Sept. 11 attacks consumed his administration.

By the time he returned to the issue in 2007, his party’s skepticism toward legalization had hardened into implacable opposition. Amplified by talk radio, populist critics denounced his plan as “shamnesty”; one called it an effort to make America a “roach motel.” Three-quarters of Republican senators opposed it.

Just a year before, a rising Republican star had urged fellow conservatives not to abandon the party’s Reaganite support for immigration.

“We are either going to prove that we believe in the ideas enshrined on the Statue of Liberty, or the American people will go looking elsewhere,” said a congressman from Indiana, Mike Pence.

But the party’s shift proved decisive. Now, as vice president, Mr. Pence loyally defends the policies set by the president and Mr. Miller.

Early Provocations

The forces that pushed the Republican Party to the right also shaped Mr. Miller.

Born in 1985, he grew up in a post-Cold War world where the acceptance of refugees was no longer seen as part of America’s resistance to a hostile foreign power. Rapid ethnic change was shaping his world.

The son of an affluent real estate investor, he entered high school in a self-consciously multicultural Santa Monica in 1999, just as California became a majority-minority state. At the start of his junior year, the attacks on Sept. 11 took nearly 3,000 lives.

The terrorist plot was central to his political awakening. Complaining that school officials were insufficiently patriotic, Mr. Miller won an uphill fight to make them enforce regulations requiring the Pledge of Allegiance. “Osama bin Laden would feel very welcome at Santa Monica High School,” he wrote in 2002 in a local publication.

Tellingly, he took his case to talk radio, as a frequent guest on “The Larry Elder Show.” It was a pattern Mr. Miller would repeat in subsequent years: airing hyperbolic claims of liberal treachery to conservative media allies. “He loved being the provocative conservative behind liberal lines,” said Ari Rosmarin, who was editor of the school newspaper and now works on criminal justice issues at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Miller’s main issue was assimilation, or what he saw as its failures. Writing in a local paper, he complained that “a number of students lacked basic English skills,” and his yearbook page quoted Theodore Roosevelt: “There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism.” The school paper ran a parody of him railing against ethnic food and demanding white bread and “fine Virginia hams, just as the founding fathers used to enjoy on their bountiful plantations.”

Classmates were often unsure whether his provocative views were sincere or a bid for attention. “Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have janitors who are paid to do it for us?” he said in a speech for student government. A video shows him flashing a self-satisfied smile as classmates jeer.

His uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, a vocal critic, dismissed the antics as “just an early adolescent desire to be noticed.”

“This talk of his philosophy seems disingenuous to me,” he said in an interview. “It’s very seductive. All the sudden, you become the darling of media big shots and you get notoriety for it at home.”

Some of Mr. Miller’s Latino classmates say his comments made them feel personally attacked. In an interview, Jason Islas said Mr. Miller told him he was ending their friendship for reasons that included “my Latino heritage.” He added, “I think he is a racist.”

But with prominent allies like David Horowitz, a conservative author and organizer, Mr. Miller headed to Duke in 2003 with the beginnings of a national reputation.

The defining issue of Mr. Miller’s college career was the arrest, when he was a junior, of three white lacrosse players accused of raping a black stripper. Mr. Miller leaped to the players’ defense, charging that administrators and faculty members saw them as emblems of white privilege and simply assumed they were guilty — a case he made on the Fox News show “The O’Reilly Factor,” then the most-watched cable news program. He demanded that the school president be fired and the prosecutor jailed.

The case collapsed. North Carolina’s attorney general declared the players innocent, the prosecutor was disbarred for misconduct and the accuser was later convicted of murdering her boyfriend. For Mr. Miller, it was a two-part vindication — reinforcing his conviction that liberal dogma about racial oppression was wrong and that his scorched-earth tactics were effective.

In his last column for the Duke Chronicle before graduating, he called himself “a deeply committed conservative who considers it his responsibility to do battle with the left.” Then he headed for Washington.

Taking the Fight to Congress

Most of Mr. Miller’s work for Mrs. Bachmann was unrelated to immigration. He wrote news releases about gas prices and fire department grants. But in February 2008, soon after he began the job, an undocumented immigrant in rural Minnesota, Olga Franco, drove through a stop sign and killed four children. Mrs. Bachmann appeared on “The O’Reilly Factor,” where she framed the issue as “anarchy versus the rule of law.”

Although Ms. Franco was convicted of vehicular homicide, the National Academy of Sciences, a group founded to convey academic consensus, has written that immigrants are “much less likely than natives to commit crimes,” and recent evidence suggests that the undocumented are no exception.

But immigrant crime would be a running theme in Mr. Miller’s career, and his emphasis on the issue borrowed from the broader restrictionist movement. To erode public support for immigration, FAIR maintains an online archive of “serious crimes by illegal aliens.”

In a 2008 congressional campaign debate, Mrs. Bachmann’s opponent accused her of exploiting the tragedy, but she argued that unauthorized immigrants were “bringing in diseases, bringing in drugs, bringing in violence” — language nearly identical to what Mr. Trump would later employ with Mr. Miller as his aide — and she mustered a slender win.

Soon after that election, Mr. Miller went to work for Representative John Shadegg of Arizona, and then quickly crossed the Capitol to work for Mr. Sessions. Perhaps the leading immigration foe in the Senate, Mr. Sessions was a product of a region where immigration had soared, largely in places unaccustomed to it. In two decades, the number of immigrants had grown fourfold in Alabama, Kentucky and South Carolina; fivefold in Arkansas, Georgia and Tennessee; and sixfold in North Carolina.

Mr. Miller had opposed immigration mostly on cultural grounds, warning that newcomers were failing to learn English and endangering public safety. But Mr. Sessions emphasized economic concerns and what he called “the real needs of working Americans,” saying foreigners threatened their jobs and wages.

As a defender of the working class, Mr. Miller had uncertain credentials. If his high school gibe about janitors was a joke, he returned to the issue at Duke. He mocked a campaign to have students thank their dorm-cleaning staff, arguing that employment was thanks enough. “The janitors need a job, which we provide,” he wrote.

Striking a self-consciously elitist pose, he ridiculed calls for improved relations with working-class Durham, N.C. (“one of the last spots in America anyone would visit”) and asked for a student smoking lounge with “plenty of mahogany and leather.”

The impact of immigrants on jobs and wages is much debated — they take jobs but make jobs, too. Most economists see greater downward pressure on wages coming from other forces, including the decline of the minimum wage (adjusted for inflation), weak unions, outsourcing and technological change.

The National Academy of Sciences concluded in 2017 that immigration’s overall effect on wages was “very small,” but added that “some studies have found sizable negative short-run impacts for high school dropouts” (who account for about 8 percent of the work force). Even among dropouts, some economists find the effects modest or nonexistent.

One prominent scholar, the Harvard economist George Borjas, consistently finds negative impacts much larger than his peers do. He is the figure Mr. Miller most often cites.

A Sign of Things to Come

In moving to Mr. Sessions’s Senate suite, Mr. Miller arrived at a crossroads for the restrictionist movement’s people and ideas.

As head of communications, Mr. Miller acquired a deep knowledge of the movement’s players and policy goals. Others in the office would also go on to influential jobs in the Trump administration, not least Mr. Sessions himself, who as attorney general presided over a policy that separated thousands of young immigrant children from parents illegally crossing the border.

Mr. Miller’s minor moment of Capitol Hill renown stems from his efforts to defeat the so-called Gang of Eight bill, a bipartisan attempt to pair new enforcement measures with legalization for most of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants, and to offer them a long path to citizenship.

He opposed the bill with the same zeal that had inspired high school parodies, haranguing reporters into the night and earning a gadfly reputation.

In retrospect, three elements of Mr. Miller’s approach foreshadowed his future exercise of power. One was his rejection of the view that Republicans needed to court minorities. The Gang of Eight bill was born after the 2012 presidential race, in which the defeated Republican, Mitt Romney, lost the Latino vote by 44 points.

No less a hard-liner than the Fox News host Sean Hannity called for legalizing most of the country’s undocumented immigrants. “Pathway to citizenship — done,” he said on his radio show. The Republican National Committee urged the party “to empower and support ethnic minorities” and “champion comprehensive immigration reform,” meaning legalization.

Mr. Miller took the opposite view, which the party ultimately followed: Mobilize the white working-class base, among whom turnout had fallen.

While Mr. Bush had seen Latinos as natural Republicans, most restrictionists saw them as an electoral threat. “If four out of five Latinos are registering with the Democrats, perhaps less immigration would be in the interest of the Republican Party, no?” wrote Jon Feere of the Center for Immigration Studies, a spinoff of FAIR. (Mr. Feere later joined the Trump administration as an immigration adviser. )

A second feature of Mr. Miller’s efforts was his symbiotic relationship with conservative media, especially online publications like Breitbart News.

Lacking gatekeepers, the internet was a medium tailor-made for anti-establishment causes. Right-wing populism had long flourished on talk radio, but Breitbart, with few restrictions on space, could cover the issue in greater depth, bringing intense scrutiny to hot-button issues. And social media made articles easy to share.

Breitbart ran three stories making the false charge, circulated by Mr. Sessions’s staff, that the bill offered undocumented immigrants free cellphones.

Mr. Miller and Breitbart worked together closely.

“Sessions: Special Interest, Extremist Groups Wrote Immigration Bill,” claimed one Breitbart headline.

“Sessions: ‘Tide is Beginning to Turn’ Against Immigration Bill,” announced another.

A third element of Mr. Miller’s work involved his alliance with outside groups, especially three that Dr. Tanton helped create and that received millions of dollars from Mrs. May’s foundation. (Over a recent 12-year period alone, the foundation gave the Center for Immigration Studies $17.6 million, FAIR $56.7 million and NumbersUSA $58.2 million.)

Once a lonely cause, restrictionism had grown into a mature movement — an intellectual ecosystem of sorts — with groups specializing in areas as diverse as litigation and voter mobilization.

When Mr. Sessions claimed on a conference call that the Gang of Eight bill threatened jobs, an analyst from the Center for Immigration Studies was on the line to vouch for the data, and Breitbart covered it as news. When the center presented its journalism award, Mr. Miller was the speaker, and his first-name references to the Center’s staff — “all the great work that Mark and Jessica and Steve are doing”— made it clear that he felt among friends.

Despite Mr. Sessions’s opposition, the bill passed in the Democratic Senate in 2013. As it headed to the Republican House, Mr. Miller drafted a 30-page memo that Mr. Sessions shared with the House Republican caucus, urging members to oppose the bill on behalf of “millions of struggling American workers.”

House leaders were mulling how to proceed when, in June 2014, an obscure Virginia professor toppled the majority leader, Eric Cantor, in a Republican primary. Though vastly outspent, the newcomer, Dave Brat, prevailed in large part by attacking Mr. Cantor for being “in cahoots” with Democrats on immigration.

“The world just changed,” Mr. Miller exulted the next day.

Indeed, it had. Among those commenting in Breitbart was the “conservative provocateur” Donald J. Trump, who said the upset showed that the Republican establishment was at risk. “Everybody is now vulnerable,” he said.

Circulating the article, Mr. Miller told friends that he wished Mr. Trump would run for president. When Mr. Trump did — demanding a wall and a ban on Muslims entering the country ��� Mr. Miller soon signed on.

The Right Kind of Candidate

Mr. Miller rose quickly on the small staff. A prolific writer and combative surrogate, he was the person most knowledgeable about the campaign’s central issue, and he lavished Mr. Trump with praise. (The Trump candidacy, Mr. Miller said, had altered “Western civilization.”) He also served as an ideological chaperone to a candidate given to sudden reversals of signature policies, a role Mr. Miller continues to play in the White House.

Mr. Trump scored a coup by winning the support of some tech workers who, after being laid off by the Walt Disney Company, were forced to train foreign replacements admitted on temporary H-1B visas.

The workers embodied Mr. Trump’s larger argument that immigration hurt American employment. Yet days after appearing with them at a rally, Mr. Trump said in a televised debate that he would drop his plan to restrict the H-1B program.

“I’m changing, I’m changing,” he told the stunned interviewer. “I’m softening the position because we have to have talented people in this country.”

Within hours, Mr. Trump reversed himself again, issuing a statement to assure his followers that he planned to “end forever the use of H-1B as a cheap labor program.”

Despite the president’s public image as an unrelenting immigration foe, some restrictionist leaders view him as soft — a businessman whose desire for labor will lead him to support more immigration. That unreliability, they say, makes Mr. Miller’s presence especially important.

“If he weren’t there, I’m pretty sure it’d be worse,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

To Remake America’s Self-Image

Mr. Miller now occupies a large West Wing office and has influence on virtually every element of immigration policy, from the words the president uses to the regulations he promulgates. Mr. Miller is a speechwriter, policy architect, personnel director, legislative aide, spokesman and strategist. At every step, he has pushed for the hardest line.

When Mr. Trump wavered on his pledge to abolish protections for 800,000 so-called Dreamers — people brought illegally to the United States as children — Mr. Miller urged conservative states to threaten lawsuits. Mr. Trump then canceled the protections.

When the president later mulled a deal to restore them, Mr. Miller stacked the negotiations with people who opposed the move, leading Mr. Trump to abandon compromise and rail against immigrants from “shithole countries.”

“As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we are going nowhere,” complained Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who supported a deal.

The Trump effort to curb immigration has played out amid so much chaos — judicial setbacks, congressional defeats, personnel purges, Twitter wars — that it can be hard to keep a running tally of its impact.

The attempt to revoke Dreamer protections has been blocked in court. An effort to bar travelers from certain predominantly Muslim countries was struck down twice. The promised border wall has not been built. A campaign to deter illegal immigration by separating thousands of children from their mothers was abandoned amid blistering criticism, including some from the right.

Still, Mr. Miller has left a big mark, in ways both obvious and obscure. After two highly publicized failures, he helped craft a travel ban that passed court muster. A fervent critic of refugee programs, he has helped cut annual admissions by about three-quarters since the end of the Obama administration.

Writing in Politico, his uncle, Dr. Glosser, expressed an “increasing horror” at his nephew’s hostility to refugees and noted that their ancestor, Wolf-Leib Glosser, arrived at Ellis Island after fleeing Russian pogroms. Had Mr. Miller’s policies prevailed then, he wrote, the Glossers probably “would have been murdered by the Nazis,” as most in their village were.

With less fanfare, Mr. Miller has guided a series of policy changes that critics liken to building an “invisible wall.” The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, counted more than 100 of them, noting that “most have moved forward untouched.”

The Trump administration quadrupled the number of work site investigations. It slowed the processing of temporary H-1B visas. It imposed new performance measures on immigration judges, to encourage faster deportations.

Though Mr. Miller was often the driving force, many of these changes were longstanding goals of the restrictionist movement. “He comes from a community of people who’ve been working on this, some of them, since the ’90s,” said Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA.

Beyond the commas and clauses of government rules, Mr. Miller and Mr. Trump are trying to change something deeper: America’s self-conception as a land of immigrants. Mr. Trump is the son of an immigrant. Two of the three women he married are immigrants. Four of his five children have an immigrant parent. Yet his immigration agency rewrote its mission statement to remove the phrase “nation of immigrants.”

Mr. Miller even took to the White House briefing room to offer a revisionist view of the Statue of Liberty. Like many in his movement, he argued it should not be seen as welcoming immigrants because it was originally built for a different purpose (to celebrate political freedom) and that the Emma Lazarus poem hailing the “huddled masses” carries little meaning because it was added later.

The border wars intensified this spring as large numbers of Central American families sought asylum and Mr. Trump, with Mr. Miller urging him on, purged top officials from the Homeland Security Department, including the secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen; he argued they weren’t doing enough to keep them out.

But a quieter bureaucratic story may have revealed as much about Mr. Miller’s priorities and bureaucratic skill.

After long deliberation, the administration last week released a 217-page rule making it easier to deny admission or permanent residency to low-income immigrants deemed likely to receive public benefits. Unlike the border disputes, this so-called public charge rule affects only legal immigrants, since the unauthorized are already barred from most safety-net programs.

Critics say the rule is already causing needy immigrants to forgo health care and nutritional aid. They call it a backdoor way of circumventing Congress and creating a new immigration system that admits fewer people, excludes the “huddled masses,” and favors Europeans over poorer Mexican and Central Americans.

Mr. Miller was so eager to see the rule enacted, he helped push out a one-time ally, L. Francis Cissna, the head of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, for not moving fast enough.

Mr. Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies argued that the rule would have only modest effects on immigrant numbers but praised Mr. Miller for asserting a principle. “The point of immigration policy is to benefit Americans,” he said, not “strain the social safety net.”

While the restrictionist movement had long taken that principle to heart, he said “Stephen understood how to operationalize it.”

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

[therightnewsnetwork]

Requiem for a Sane Immigration Policy

Jonathan Blanks

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent threat to pull grants from “sanctuary cities” should come as no surprise to those who spent any time listening to the rhetoric of then-candidate Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Doing so, you might have thought that a very disproportionate number of America’s problems are caused by “illegal immigrants”—people who lack the legal qualifications to live and work in this country. It is to remedy this apparent problem that President Trump wants to increase immigration enforcement and build a wall on the southern border of the United States. Even if we put aside the enormous price tag to build and man a border wall of that size and the logistical nightmare required to successfully identify, detain, and deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, these laws will not likely fix the problems they are meant to solve. Indeed, history shows that increased immigration enforcement and other measures meant to discourage immigration have unintended consequences that can actually increase the number of undocumented immigrants and decrease overall public safety.

History shows that increased immigration enforcement has often had unintended consequences, ones these laws are supposedly there to prevent.

Take, for example, the border wall. What walls the United States already has on its southern border were built to keep unauthorized people out of the country, and Trump’s proposed expansion will, according to him, be better than what we have now. But as Douglas Massey noted in 2015, when the current walls and enforcement militarized the border in the 1980s and ’90s, it disrupted decades of “circular” migration. Before the buildup, Mexican migrants would typically come to the United States to work and then return home voluntarily, so at any given time the “illegal” population was relatively small. However, by making the trip across the border more difficult—and thus more expensive and dangerous for unauthorized persons—more migrants stayed in the United States. In effect, the current walls have been much better at keeping unauthorized immigrants in the United States than it has at keeping them out.

And as my colleague Alex Nowrasteh has written, a large reason we have so many unauthorized immigrants in the first place is that the government shut down programs that allowed people to come and work legally. Among these was the Bracero program that allowed seasonal migration for labor:

From 1942 to 1964, nearly five million Mexican workers legally entered and worked in the United States on Bracero, returning home at the end of their seasonal employment. At the height of the program, half a million workers came in annually to work on American farms. In its main failing as a bill, the 1965 Act did not create a similarly flexible migrant work visa and also piled on more wage regulations for the few economic migrants allowed, consigning these migrants to work as illegal immigrants.

Bracero was not without its flaws, but the fact remains that when given legal means to make money in the United States, immigrants took advantage and played by the rules. Our current laws, on the other hand, prevent most unskilled immigrants from coming here legally and don’t allow those already here to “go to the back of the line” to do so. Our current system is incapable of meeting the labor demands of the American economy, and the laws of economics usually trump the laws of Congress. Thus, millions of good, hardworking people live in the shadows in violation of inapt, antiquated laws so that they can make a living and keep the American economy going.

Some of the sensationalist rhetoric around undocumented immigrants has also focused on crime and violence, very often on rare and horrific acts of violencecaused by individuals here illegally. But a wide range of data show that increased violent crime rates are not correlated with increased immigration and, indeed, may be inversely correlated. In plain English, an increase in immigrant populations does not result in crime increases and, in many cases, may result in crime rate declines. Almost all available data show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, and violent crimes in particular. Although no one can be sure exactly why these data show this, it makes intuitive sense that people who self-select to leave their loved ones to find work in a new country would be less likely to violate the laws and norms that would jeopardize the opportunities they sacrificed so much for.

Again, however, certain federal law enforcement practices undermine the principles they are supposedly there to uphold. In recent weeks, federal immigration officials have seized or prepared to seize people at courthouses who may be in violation of immigration laws. Perhaps the most famous case came from El Paso, Texas when federal agents detained a woman who was filing a protective order against a domestic abuser. Some people close to the case believe the woman’s abuser was the person who tipped off federal authorities to her court appearance.

Since the El Paso case, court watchers and lawyers have noticed that domestic violence and sexual assault complaints are measurably down in Latino areas in cities like Los Angeles and Denver. Crime victims who fear deportation—or perhaps deportation of innocent loved ones—are reluctant or unwilling to come forward to identify their abusers. This chilling effect most directly harms the victims of crimes, not the perpetrators, who may not even themselves be immigrants.

Police officers cannot do their jobs effectively without cooperation from victims, witnesses, and other members of the general public. One detective complained to the Los Angeles Times that “I can’t get justice for people, because all of a sudden, I’m losing my witnesses or my victims because they’re afraid that talking to me is going to lead to them getting deported.” Nevertheless, immigration authorities continue to subvert the priorities of local law enforcement, including posing as local police officers to gain entry into immigrants’ homes, which law enforcement officials called “corrosive…to public safety.”

According to an internal memorandum, the Trump Administration has explored lowering hiring standards for agents to dramatically increase staffing at Border Patrol and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). If history is a guide, lower standards will lead to increased problems of misconduct and corruption, due to the intense pressure to smuggle drugs, guns, money, and people across the American border, often with the assistance of bribed or otherwise compromised agents. Jay Ahern, a deputy commissioner of CBP in the George W. Bush Administration, told Foreign Policy, “We actually lived through this…If you start lowering standards, the organization pays for it for the next decade, two, or three.” The federal government has released studies that indicate the highest incidents of misconduct and corruption in CBP happen at the southwestern U.S. border. More people on guard does not necessarily mean better border security.

Federal immigration enforcement policy has been working at cross-purposes with its stated goals for decades, and the Trump Administration seems dedicated to the most counter-productive policies to those ends. The walls and laws that were created to keep people out have kept far more undocumented people in the country than there had been in years past. Trump wants more laws and walls. Yet the overzealous tactics to target victims of crimes for possible deportation poison the relationship between local police and those they are sworn to protect and serve, allowing more crime to happen and more violent criminals to escape justice. Trump’s Department of Justice is pushing the envelope of aggressive enforcement. And to implement a hasty increase of immigration officials on the border would be to repeat a recent mistake that could lead to more problems of bribery, smuggling, and corruption among federal law enforcement, thus diminishing border security. Trump appears to be pushing for quantity at the very high price of officer quality.

Would it be too much to ask to make immigration policy sane again?

Jonathan Blanks is a research associate in the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and managing editor of PoliceMisconduct.net

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[patriotnewsblogger-blog]

Requiem for a Sane Immigration Policy

New Post has been published on http://www.therightnewsnetwork.com/requiem-for-a-sane-immigration-policy/

Requiem for a Sane Immigration Policy

Jonathan Blanks

Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s recent threat to pull grants from “sanctuary cities” should come as no surprise to those who spent any time listening to the rhetoric of then-candidate Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Doing so, you might have thought that a very disproportionate number of America’s problems are caused by “illegal immigrants”—people who lack the legal qualifications to live and work in this country. It is to remedy this apparent problem that President Trump wants to increase immigration enforcement and build a wall on the southern border of the United States. Even if we put aside the enormous price tag to build and man a border wall of that size and the logistical nightmare required to successfully identify, detain, and deport the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, these laws will not likely fix the problems they are meant to solve. Indeed, history shows that increased immigration enforcement and other measures meant to discourage immigration have unintended consequences that can actually increase the number of undocumented immigrants and decrease overall public safety.

History shows that increased immigration enforcement has often had unintended consequences, ones these laws are supposedly there to prevent.

Take, for example, the border wall. What walls the United States already has on its southern border were built to keep unauthorized people out of the country, and Trump’s proposed expansion will, according to him, be better than what we have now. But as Douglas Massey noted in 2015, when the current walls and enforcement militarized the border in the 1980s and ’90s, it disrupted decades of “circular” migration. Before the buildup, Mexican migrants would typically come to the United States to work and then return home voluntarily, so at any given time the “illegal” population was relatively small. However, by making the trip across the border more difficult—and thus more expensive and dangerous for unauthorized persons—more migrants stayed in the United States. In effect, the current walls have been much better at keeping unauthorized immigrants in the United States than it has at keeping them out.

And as my colleague Alex Nowrasteh has written, a large reason we have so many unauthorized immigrants in the first place is that the government shut down programs that allowed people to come and work legally. Among these was the Bracero program that allowed seasonal migration for labor:

From 1942 to 1964, nearly five million Mexican workers legally entered and worked in the United States on Bracero, returning home at the end of their seasonal employment. At the height of the program, half a million workers came in annually to work on American farms. In its main failing as a bill, the 1965 Act did not create a similarly flexible migrant work visa and also piled on more wage regulations for the few economic migrants allowed, consigning these migrants to work as illegal immigrants.

Bracero was not without its flaws, but the fact remains that when given legal means to make money in the United States, immigrants took advantage and played by the rules. Our current laws, on the other hand, prevent most unskilled immigrants from coming here legally and don’t allow those already here to “go to the back of the line” to do so. Our current system is incapable of meeting the labor demands of the American economy, and the laws of economics usually trump the laws of Congress. Thus, millions of good, hardworking people live in the shadows in violation of inapt, antiquated laws so that they can make a living and keep the American economy going.

Some of the sensationalist rhetoric around undocumented immigrants has also focused on crime and violence, very often on rare and horrific acts of violencecaused by individuals here illegally. But a wide range of data show that increased violent crime rates are not correlated with increased immigration and, indeed, may be inversely correlated. In plain English, an increase in immigrant populations does not result in crime increases and, in many cases, may result in crime rate declines. Almost all available data show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, and violent crimes in particular. Although no one can be sure exactly why these data show this, it makes intuitive sense that people who self-select to leave their loved ones to find work in a new country would be less likely to violate the laws and norms that would jeopardize the opportunities they sacrificed so much for.

Again, however, certain federal law enforcement practices undermine the principles they are supposedly there to uphold. In recent weeks, federal immigration officials have seized or prepared to seize people at courthouses who may be in violation of immigration laws. Perhaps the most famous case came from El Paso, Texas when federal agents detained a woman who was filing a protective order against a domestic abuser. Some people close to the case believe the woman’s abuser was the person who tipped off federal authorities to her court appearance.

Since the El Paso case, court watchers and lawyers have noticed that domestic violence and sexual assault complaints are measurably down in Latino areas in cities like Los Angeles and Denver. Crime victims who fear deportation—or perhaps deportation of innocent loved ones—are reluctant or unwilling to come forward to identify their abusers. This chilling effect most directly harms the victims of crimes, not the perpetrators, who may not even themselves be immigrants.

Police officers cannot do their jobs effectively without cooperation from victims, witnesses, and other members of the general public. One detective complained to the Los Angeles Times that “I can’t get justice for people, because all of a sudden, I’m losing my witnesses or my victims because they’re afraid that talking to me is going to lead to them getting deported.” Nevertheless, immigration authorities continue to subvert the priorities of local law enforcement, including posing as local police officers to gain entry into immigrants’ homes, which law enforcement officials called “corrosive…to public safety.”

According to an internal memorandum, the Trump Administration has explored lowering hiring standards for agents to dramatically increase staffing at Border Patrol and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). If history is a guide, lower standards will lead to increased problems of misconduct and corruption, due to the intense pressure to smuggle drugs, guns, money, and people across the American border, often with the assistance of bribed or otherwise compromised agents. Jay Ahern, a deputy commissioner of CBP in the George W. Bush Administration, told Foreign Policy, “We actually lived through this…If you start lowering standards, the organization pays for it for the next decade, two, or three.” The federal government has released studies that indicate the highest incidents of misconduct and corruption in CBP happen at the southwestern U.S. border. More people on guard does not necessarily mean better border security.

Federal immigration enforcement policy has been working at cross-purposes with its stated goals for decades, and the Trump Administration seems dedicated to the most counter-productive policies to those ends. The walls and laws that were created to keep people out have kept far more undocumented people in the country than there had been in years past. Trump wants more laws and walls. Yet the overzealous tactics to target victims of crimes for possible deportation poison the relationship between local police and those they are sworn to protect and serve, allowing more crime to happen and more violent criminals to escape justice. Trump’s Department of Justice is pushing the envelope of aggressive enforcement. And to implement a hasty increase of immigration officials on the border would be to repeat a recent mistake that could lead to more problems of bribery, smuggling, and corruption among federal law enforcement, thus diminishing border security. Trump appears to be pushing for quantity at the very high price of officer quality.

Would it be too much to ask to make immigration policy sane again?

Jonathan Blanks is a research associate in the Cato Institute’s Project on Criminal Justice and managing editor of PoliceMisconduct.net

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