The progressive response to President Trump’s deportations is just getting underway, and it’s already dumb and hysterical.
According to MSNBC hosts Nicolle Wallace and Joy Reid, we are potentially headed down the path of another Holocaust.
“Similarities to what happened in Germany and what’s happening now in America are just undeniable,” Reid said the other day.
A common refrain is that the criminal illegal aliens who are being targeted are overwhelmingly black and brown, proving that something nefarious is afoot.
Leave it to progressives to see in these deportees not, first and foremost, violent offenders who represent a threat to the public, but people of color who are inherently victims.
Al Sharpton asserted on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that “we’re looking for people of a certain black or brown color.”
On “The View,” Sunny Hostin explained that the Trump deportations are going out of their way to target “a certain group or type of immigrant.”
Hostin believes that there are a lot of Asian and European visa-overstayers who are getting off scot-free while the administration goes after immigrants coming over the border because of the color of their skin.
“So I think there’s a very clear message as to what this president wants the look of a criminal migrant to look like,” she said, adding that “I think that’s racist,” to the applause of the studio audience.
This is predictably ill-informed.
According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 2022, 80% of all illegal immigrants in the United States were from Latin America and the Caribbean.
The top five countries of origin were Mexico (45% of illegal migrants), Guatemala (7%), El Salvador (6%), Honduras (5%), and India (3%).
No European country made the top 10. Altogether, illegal immigrants from Europe, Canada and Oceania were 7%.
The picture is overwhelmingly of non-white illegal immigrants, who are coming from poor countries with some geographical proximity to us.
This is a fact.
It has nothing to do with how Trump “wants” illegal immigrants to look.
If ICE undertakes entirely randomized raids, 80% of the people it finds are going to be black and brown.
Now, the raids aren’t random — they, for now, are largely, if not entirely, targeting criminal aliens.
As a general matter, criminal offending is associated with low levels of education and socio-economic status.
That doesn’t mean that all poor people are criminals.
But you are likelier to get entangled with the law if you are an immigrant who hasn’t graduated high school compared to one who has a medical degree.
(The same is true of the US-born population).
So, why isn’t ICE cuffing lots of Indian illegal immigrants?
If we assume that the demographic characteristics of Indian illegal immigrants are broadly consonant with — although not exactly the same as — Indian immigrants generally, they’ll have a different profile than other illegal immigrants.
The Migration Policy Institute notes, “On average, Indian immigrants are highly skilled and earn significant incomes: the vast majority hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, their median income is more than double that of the US- and overall foreign-born populations, and their likelihood of living in poverty is half that of these groups.”
Hostin cited visa-overstayers, and there are a fair amount from Canada.
But, again, they are travelers and students coming from a relatively affluent, well-educated country and so are unlikely to be mixed up with, say, prison gangs.
What’s the French-Canadian equivalent of Tren de Aragua?
Of course, every illegal immigrant should be subject to deportation, but however we draw the line, the criminal migrant, as Hostin put it, is never going to look how she and fellow race-obsessed commentators want.
The logic of their view is that it’s racist to keep out non-white illegal immigrants, racist to make them go and, at the end of the day, racist to have a country that takes its borders seriously.
And they wonder why they are losing.
Twitter: @RichLowry
