Whenever a crime committed by an illegal immigrant makes the news, proponents of open borders react with something I’ll call the “Homegrown Criminal Fallacy.”
Mollie Tibbetts’ death is fueling anti-immigration rhetoric. But immigrants have a lower crime rate https://t.co/ro8WWj5cMA
— TIME (@TIME) August 23, 2018
The Homegrown Criminal Fallacy says that because we already have terrible people here in America, we need not be overly concerned about violent crimes committed by immigrants (whether they’re here legally or not).
The fact that we have homegrown criminals doesn’t make it any less horrible when criminals come to America from elsewhere. A murder is a tragedy, no matter who commits it. Any tragedy stings more when responsible parties miss the opportunities to stop it.
This is why we feel collective horror when trusted institutions let us down. The massacres at Parkland, Pulse Nightclub, and Fort Hood are made all the more heartbreaking because law enforcement knew of the perpetrators beforehand. The horrors of San Bernardino and the Boston Marathon bombing break our hearts because at some point, someone in government made the conscious decision to allow the future perpetrators into America. The good guys had their chance, they missed it, and now innocent people are dead.
Crimes committed by illegal immigrants touch a nerve because the good guys never had a chance. If our entry and exit system was effective, the government would have had the chance to stop people like the killers of Mollie Tibbetts and Kate Steinle from entering the country at all.
In a country of 320 million people, some of those people are bound to be bad apples. Most of those bad apples are garden-variety jerks, like people who cut others off in traffic, cheat on their taxes, or don’t tip their servers. They make daily life for others harder out of selfishness, but generally don’t cause life-altering problems. A tiny fraction of any nation’s homegrown bad apples are true menaces, the ones who steal, assault, and murder.
Their crimes shouldn’t happen. But no matter how terrible these people may be, they have a right to U.S. citizenship since they were born here. We’re stuck with them. But we can, in theory, control who arrives here from other nations, and it’s only rational to want to keep dangerous people out.
Not a single American institution ever had the chance to say whether or not Mollie Tibbetts’ alleged killer should be allowed to live and work here. Yet he did, for about 4 years, before Tibbetts was slain.
Our government has the right, and the duty, to make sure that anyone allowed in from somewhere else is not a threat to public safety.
At present, immigrants (legal or not) commit violent crimes at a lower rate than natural born citizens. That’s exactly how it should be. Any country with a functional immigration system should be bringing good people in and keeping criminals out.
The discrepancy in crime rates means that the vetting process is weeding some of the dangerous people out. The vetting process isn’t perfect (as demonstrated by the tragedies in San Bernardino and the Boston Marathon), but it is better than no vetting at all, which is what happens with illegal immigration.
I’m not arguing that every immigrant must be an Eagle Scout, a brilliant neurosurgeon, or a tireless parent of 12 straight-A students. I’m asking that they be a decent person, or at the very least a verified non-threat to to commit violent crimes. Lots of people can clear this bar, and if they want to be part of the American fabric, we ought to welcome them with open arms. But without securing the border, the government cannot set that bar at all.
Angela Morabito (@AngelaLMorabito) writes about politics, media, ethics, and culture. She holds both a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Georgetown University.
