The Weekly Sift

For the second straight week, I start with a Paul Krugman column. This time it’s “Return of the Blood Libel” from Thursday. The key observation concerns the Trump administration’s family-separation policy, the one that has obsessed the country for the least two weeks.

What’s almost equally remarkable about this plunge into barbarism is that it’s not a response to any actual problem. The mass influx of murderers and rapists that Trump talks about, the wave of crime committed by immigrants here (and, in his mind, refugees in Germany), are things that simply aren’t happening. They’re just sick fantasies being used to justify real atrocities.

This observation isn’t new, and Krugman isn’t the first to point it out. Trump started his campaign by talking about Mexican rapists. His acceptance speech at the Republican Convention warned that “illegal immigrant families … are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.” His inaugural address painted a picture of “American carnage” which he promised “stops right here and stops right now”. Yesterday he tweeted: “Strong Borders, No Crime!”, as if America had no indigenous criminals, but suffered only from rampaging gangsters that cross our borders.

And from the beginning, it’s all been bullshit. Violent crime is on a long-term downward trend in America, and very little of the remaining murder and mayhem is carried out by undocumented immigrants. If the US isn’t safe enough for you yet, neither the Muslim Ban nor the mistreatment of refugees from Central America going to make you safer. And if you ignore the nationwide stats and focus on a border town like Brownsville, Texas? “We’re doing fine,” says the mayor.

[Commenters have been confused by the “per 100,000 population”, so I’ll clarify. The question is: Is that per 100K of the state’s entire population, or per 100K of the named group? If it were the former, then the apparent pro-immigrant point is lost; there are more native-born people than immigrants, so of course they commit more crimes. But if you click through to the WaPo article I got the chart from, and then keep clicking until you get to their source, you wind up at a report from the Cato Institute, where the charts are labelled less ambiguously: “per 100,000 in each subpopulation”. So the chart is saying that immigrants commit fewer crimes per capita than native-born Americans.]

Lots of writers have making comparisons to the Nazis as they see the mindless cruelty of the family-separation policy, or the concentration camps that will be needed to hold all those waiting for immigration hearings, if they have to be held. (They don’t have to be held.) But Krugman points back to an even earlier era of anti-Semitism: the centuries of random riots and organized pogroms incited by the Blood Libel — the myth that secret Jewish Passover rituals required the sacrifice of Christian children. All it took was for a child to go missing at the wrong time, and mobs would descend on the local Jewish ghetto, seeking revenge for an imaginary horror.

Picture for a moment the helplessness you would feel if you were either a Jew or a sympathetic Christian hoping to prevent the upcoming Passover from ending in tragedy. You can’t get the Jews to stop sacrificing Christian children, because they were never doing that in the first place. The underlying cause of the looming riot is in a mythological realm you can’t access.

Same thing here. Both Presidents Bush and Obama imagined that they might be able to compromise with anti-immigration hardliners by strengthening enforcement. And so over the last 20 years we’ve had more and more fence built, more and more agents manning the border, more and more deportations. And what they’ve gotten in exchange is exactly nothing, because the border that matters, the one that murderers and rapists and drug mules are streaming across at will, isn’t in the real world at all. When the problem that motivates someone is imaginary, there’s nothing anybody else can do about it.

Some people, Andrew Sullivan for example, appear not to have learned this lesson. Just one more real-world effort, they think, and Trump’s irrationally fearful supporters will be satisfied:

So give him his fucking wall. He won the election. He is owed this. It may never be completed; it may not work, as hoped. But it is now the only way to reassure a critical mass of Americans that mass immigration is under control, and the only way to make any progress under this president. And until the white working and middle classes are reassured, we will get nowhere.

But why will they be reassured by a wall that doesn’t get completed and won’t work? Why will they be reassured by anything that happens in the real world? Won’t there still be examples of whites who get killed by undocumented immigrants? Won’t there still be unemployed whites who blame Hispanics with jobs? Won’t demagogues still tell them that subhuman vermin are streaming by the millions across our open borders? Build the wall, open concentration camps, start shooting illegal immigrants on sight — what changes?

You can’t compromise with bullshit. It isn’t just that it’s not smart; it simply doesn’t work.

This is an across-the-board problem with the Trump administration. Take Canada, for example. How is it going to shrink its trade surplus with the US when it doesn’t have a trade surplus with the US? What could possibly be done to end discrimination against Christians in America when there is no discrimination against Christians in America? How do we end the War on Coal when there is no War on Coal?

When claims are based on nothing, they can go on being based on nothing, no matter what you do to mollify the people who make those claims.

You can sympathize with people, even if they vote against you. And when they point to actual problems in the real world, you can offer them solutions, or at least concessions.

But the Jews of Prague and Warsaw had nothing to offer Christian parents who worried about their children being sacrificed and their blood baked into matzah. Their fear was quite real, but their problem lived in a mythic realm beyond any Jew’s influence.

Similarly, there is nothing we can offer those who worry about “American carnage” or the persecution of Christians or unfair Canadian trade.

Real-world solutions can’t touch imaginary problems. You can’t compromise with bullshit.