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The Response to the Maryland Rape Case Is a Stain on the Right
We are all, justly, very sensitive to and sick of charges of “racism” being thrown around promiscuously at the right for any and every deviation from leftist orthodoxy. But just as we say to Muslims about terrorism, our ability to object with credibility depends on a willingness to police our own.
Our media, including many of our Ricochet luminaries are failing in that task right now by joining in the hysteria over the undoubtedly horrific rape of a 9th grade girl in Rockville, Maryland.
For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know the story, it is fairly straightforward. The victim was allegedly forced into a boys bathroom at her school and brutally raped by two older boys/men. Reports I’ve seen state that one was 17 and the other 18.
So far we have a horrible, but local, crime. It has become a cause celeb because at least one (and perhaps both, reports I’ve seen vary) of the alleged perpetrators was in the United States illegally.
To get the obvious caveats out of the way: 1) this should never have happened and the victim deserves our sympathy and support; and 2) if found guilty the perpetrators should have the book thrown at them and if they ever get out of prison should be launched back to wherever they came from by catapult, preferably after being doused in gasoline and set ablaze.
My point isn’t about the victim or the perpetrators in this case, it is about (some of our) eagerness to make this case about something more than the victim and the perpetrators.
Racism is a species of what we used to call “prejudice” – the “prejudging” or having a negative presumption about an entire class of persons based on the behavior or attributes of a few members of that class. The two have become somewhat conflated in the public discourse for two reasons I think. First of all, back in the day racism to a significant degree took the form of widely held negative stereotypes about black Americans (e.g. all blacks are criminals), and second, frankly, the “racism” charge has been thrown around so much by the left at this point that it’s sort of taken over the field. It’s made it difficult to recall that it is really pre-judgment that is wrong – the tarring all members of a class/race/etc. with the negative attributes or acts of a few. The fact that some of the most problematic pre-judgment was at one time against blacks is historically contingent. That just happened to be the form in which the underlying pathology of prejudice most obviously presented itself.
My understanding of the position of the right has been that, while we object to the overuse of the charge of racism, we have accepted the quite reasonable view that prejudice is in fact wrong and that individuals should be judged on their individual merits.
That notion comports so perfectly with other ideas important to the right, such as equality before the law, self reliance and individual responsibility, and respect for legal process.
Yet for some reason, in the current environment, it’s become acceptable for even usually very sober and responsible voices on the right to take this case and treat it as representative of every illegal immigrant in America. That is pre-judging of the worst sort. Whether it is racially motivated or not is irrelevant.
In an effort to police our own we need to remember that facts still matter. Not everything needs to be a meme. Here the facts are as follows:
- Two men (allegedly) committed a heinous crime.
- At least one of them was an illegal immigrant.
- But the illegal immigrant population did not commit a heinous crime.
A couple of other facts worth remembering are that a) most illegal immigrants never commit a crime save crossing the border illegally, and b) illegal immigrants are in fact incarcerated at a much lower rate than native born Americans.
I know the major media, which is in the business of selling hysteria, will not keep these facts in mind, but among ourselves it would be nice if we could discuss this subject with some precision and remember what we’re actually talking about. It would be even nicer if our mandarins here at Ricochet with a louder bully pulpit than we puny mortals would take heed as well.
Published in Domestic Policy, Immigration
Your point is well taken. In 1956 a nice girl of German descent in my sixth class was rapped by her 14 year old brother.
Cato: as I said on the infamous “Mona” thread on the same topic:
I think the people entering our country illegally are a mixed bag -from people who’re unlikely to break all but minor laws to hardened criminals – and every category in between. Our government, in collecting these people at the border and disseminating them around the country appear to have made little to no effort to determine who these people are and where they’d fit on this continuum. I don’t think they (government) care – they have a greater objective in these actions and don’t give a damn about the financial and personal risks they subject the rest of us to.
The problem is that the Left wants us to ignore all problems with illegal immigration. They want us to shut up and allow them to control the narrative.
I think it is entirely unproblematic to advocate for the vetting of immigrants for criminal histories, terrorist ties, etc. I think I’m fairly pro-immigrant, but I absolutely accept 100% the notion that we have the prerogative to decide who to let into this country and who to keep out, being a person who’s history does not suggest a likelihood of violence is an exceptionally low bar to clear. Regrettably, I think the scale of the task is just beyond the capacity of our not especially competent government.
So we give up?
Those statistics are laughable and suffer numerous problems.
Consider all 25-year-olds. Those in prison will have to have been here long enough to have committed sufficient crimes to draw the attention of the law and be prosecuted and be convicted.
Probably few 25-year old illegals who came over in the last 3 or so years will have gotten to that point, even if they have been committing a crime spree ever since.
Thus there could well be a stat that says native born 25-year-olds are 4 times more likely than illegal immigrant 25-year-olds to be in prison, but in reality, the latter are much more likely to be committing crimes now.
Even the left admits to massive underreporting of crimes within the illegal alien community (the shadows…).
Undocumented criminals also seem harder to catch due to their lack of documentation. Contrast a native who has been in the system as a juvenile and is documented up the wazoo.
Then some of these stats are based on bizarre race norming where they compare, for example, illegal aliens to their own anchor babies (until this Cato garbage, a Pew survey doing just that was what was cited by open borders types). The fact that the anchor babies have a very high crime rate in absolute terms should be a reason for more immigration enforcement, not less.
Well they lie.
Their leaders lie.
I am tired of losing to them. But hey, if you like losing to them then that is fine. Just keep on keeping on….
The pro-amnesty Conservatives and Republicans have used the exact same emotional arguments as the left. It seems the only side not allowed to use emotional arguments are those against illegal immigration.
This statement bears no logic. What can one do with it? Nothing about this statement changes or even addresses the fact that we have immigration laws to be enforced. You are referencing immigration policy not immigration law.
Parent of Murder Victim: My child was killed by someone who was in the United States illegally! If the immigration laws were enforced, this would never have happened!
Open-Borders Type: Statistically, your child had no greater chance of being killed by someone illegally in the US than by a natural-born citizen.
Parent of Victim: Oh, I feel better now.
I am looking and looking, and I don’t see anyone, anywhere, stating “all Illegals are rapists.”
What I see everywhere is good people saying that the immigration policy of the previous administration is directly responsible for this rape. The previous policy took Illegals, and with no background checks at all, resettled them around the country.
You seem to believe that this rape was pure happenstance and nobody is to blame. The rest of us know it how it happened, and how it could have been prevented.
Everyone in that school district knew those two men were here illegally. One snuck across the border from El Salvador and one snuck across the border from Guatemala. Instead of arguing about that, we should be demanding that the Maryland School District provide us with the exact process that allowed these men to be put in classes with 14-year-old children. Once they are done explaining exactly how it happened, then those school district officials should be run out of town on a rail and the processes and policies should be re-written, and every other illegal “student” in the school district should be removed and deported. Then we should follow the same process in school districts around the country.
As far as the Cato study, it is ridiculously broken. They admit “the ambiguity in illegal immigrant incarceration” and frequent references to “there were an estimated…” means they do not have any real numbers and so they are guessing. They wrote that study specifically to “prove” that Illegals are less likely to commit crimes then native-born Americans. There are zero “facts”, as you call them, in that study.
Its true that hard cases make bad law. But we can rationally and soberly admit that our current approach to immigration is problematic and that some of our citizens have suffered economic and tragic personal consequences as a result.
A well-managed, thoughtful immigration system with an eye toward benefiting our citizens in the long run would be a positive thing for this country. But that’s not what we have – what we have is a disastrous mess.
Just because the statement doesn’t help answer the question you care about doesn’t mean it makes no sense. If you read the OP, you’ll see that it’s not about the question you’re asking. If you want to have an OP about the question of whether we should enforce immigration law, write one.
Okay good. I like when we agree. Let’s keep going.
Do you agree that using dirty, dishonest arguments carries negative costs? For example, damage to social cohesion.
I hate to be a broken record here, but they say this exact same thing about you guys to rationalize the very thing you say they do.
In several countries I have traveled and lived in the police take interesting stand on traffic accidents. When a foreigner is involved they automatically blame the foreigner for the accident. Their logic goes like this. You are a foreigner and you decided to come here. If you had not done that the accident before us would not have happened so it is your fault.
Which I think is a bit of what is going on with this immigrant crime. If they had not come here there would have been no rape. So immigration is dangerous.
A story presented as factually true when it isn’t—e.g. Michael Brown and “Hands Up Don’t Shoot”—is a lie. A factually-correct story of an unusual event presented as if it is the norm is also a lie, but so is pretending that the factually-correct story never happened, or is so “vanishingly rare” that it’s silly to bring it up (e.g. late-term abortions).
But human beings do our moral reasoning with stories. As long as the facts are agreed to (the child was raped, at least one of her attackers was an illegal immigrant, there were two young and unknown/un-vetted men placed by the school with much younger classmates, etc) it is reasonable to use it as a test-case and see whether, with considerable effort, useful wisdom can be extracted from it.
A few weeks ago, Portland, Maine police officers shot and killed a mentally-ill young man who had been pointing what turned out to be a pellet-rifle at passers-by and screaming. Because the young man is black, the pre-judgement is (huge surprise here!) “Portland police officers, like all American police officers, are racist.” I am, in my small way, pushing instead the interpretation “we need to take better care of mentally ill people.” Because I am extremely partisan in at least two directions—I have personal reasons to care a lot about both cops and the mentally ill— it bothers me that more Mainers don’t see this story the way I do, without my having to persuade them.
Pre-judgement could lead Americans to conclude that illegal immigrants are all rapists… or that illegal immigrants, by definition, aren’t vetted and an inadequate immigration regime does not provide Americans with the protection we have the right to expect… or that that undocumented immigrants come into this country pure of heart and clean of conscience, but listening to the recorded voice of the President bragging about grabbing women, they were infected them with toxic masculinity so they’re really victims…
I know you keep saying it, Fred.
So what? Who cares if that’s what the other side says?
Well, somebody has to be in the wrong here, right?
Seems to me that there’s three possibilities:
1. They’re right, you started it.
2. You’re right, they stated it.
3. Both sides are wrong. Both sides started it.
The answer matters because it establishes the moral high ground and who is in the right Now, it seems a hell of a lot more likely that it’s #3.
In that case, neither side can justify it because neither side is in the right and therefore neither has a justification for dishonesty.
I think it is if your opponent is negotiating in good faith. You going to try and say that the Democrat side, or the open borders side, or whatever you want to call the side, is negotiating in good faith about what to do with illegal immigrants?
The folly of that failed analogy is seen by the lack of a closer analogy. In the US, when an illegal is involved in a traffic accident, there effectively is a catch and release. Many local cops do not want to deal with the issue. If I crash into you and my license had previously been suspended, you can be sure that I am going to be hauled off to jail. Heck, if I had an outstanding parking ticket I likely would be hauled away. An illegal without a license, not so sure.
Question:
The premise is that not all illegal immigrants should be lumped in with the few illegal immigrants who commit these horrible crimes, but is it not accurate to say that if we vigorously enforced our immigration laws, those few would, at the very least, not have been in the position they were when they did commit those crimes?
Let’s say that, instead of this case, we took that case from last year out of San Francisco where the illegal who shot that young lady had been deported 5 previous times. How about after, say, they third time he was found to be in here illegally, he gets locked up for a couple of decades in a federal prison for violating our federal laws? Would that not have removed him from the position he was in on that fateful day after his fifth time being caught in this country illegally? And if that type of jail time is not possible under our current law, should that not be the reform we seek instead of granting amnesty to them?
I don’t see that linking cases such as this one to the issue of illegal immigration is prejudiced or racist in any way.
As Mark Steyn has said, rapes and other crimes are jobs that Americans WILL do. We don’t need to allow people to enter the country illegally and commit those crimes. We have enough of a problem with criminality as it is.
Is it so difficult to understand the frustration and anger that results from lax enforcement and willful non-enforcement (so-called “sanctuary cities”), when aliens who should not be within our borders prey upon our citizens?
If I were the victim’s father, this would be the primary reason for my anger: The 18-year-old rapist shouldn’t have been in the country, much less in a class of freshmen.
Very unlikely that an agreement can be reached about who started it, so it’s irrelevant. And it’s certainly not a response worth repeating
Regardless of who started it, that is the battleground upon which we find ourselves.
(I am not conceding dishonesty with this story BTW. Simply addressing your lament that the other side says the same about the right.)
I agree here, I think Cato is applying the rule wrongly to the facts.
This is very insulting to many members here, if not most.
In my city, this is the case when illegals are involved in most lower -level crimes. They charge them, set a court date, and the chargee never shows. Or the case is pled down to “criminal trespass” (this is quite common!) and they’re essentially let go.
I love it when you get tired of this stuff Ms. Lily ….
I disagree that it’s irrelevant. “They started it” is being used as a justification for the kind of argument that poisons political discourse.