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Everything in this tweet is wrong?
Thread: (1/)
Everything in this tweet is wrong?
Thread: (1/)
1.Nearly all the heroin (and cocaine and meth) that enters the US today comes in through official ports of entry, i.e. legal border crossings and airports. It isn’t snuck in across the desert. Building a wall would do nothing to change this. See @adam_wola wola.org/analysis/four-…
2.“Millions of guns illegally pass via the border “ is deliberately misleading. The guns crossing the border are guns from the U.S. going to Mexico, fueling Mexico’s drug war. Estimates vary from 583 to 2,000 per day, including AR-15s favored by cartels. academic.oup.com/joeg/article/1…
Most are bought legally through straw purchasing from US gun distributors. This number might be brought down through stricter gun control; presumably Kirk doesn’t want that. atf.gov/firearms/docs/…
3. There are no reliable estimates on child sex trafficking. See Congressional Research Service: “The exact number of child victims of sex trafficking in the United States is unknown because comprehensive research and scientific data are lacking.” fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R…
Kirk’s 15,000 figure seems to come from a 14-year-old State Dept. report: “Estimates of people trafficked into the United States ranged from 14,500 to 17,500.” This figure is neither specific to children nor to sex trafficking nor to the US-Mexico border. state.gov/j/tip/rls/tipr…
The USG's definition of trafficking victims is deliberately broad to include both sex trafficking and labor trafficking, in order to build bipartisan support for the 2000 Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
Estimates of human trafficking, including sex trafficking, tend to blow up arbitrarily depending on the political climate. At one point the CIA said there were as many as 50,000 entering the US per year. A Justice Department investigation under Bush found 1,362 victims in 7 years
Alberto Gonzalez later told Congress that the 14,500 figure was probably exaggerated. washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content…
4.There are not “thousands of MS13 animals” passing through our borders. FBI estimates show the gang’s membership is not growing. The number of unauthorized immigrants has been dropping since 2007, but those who are crossing are overwhelmingly victims of gangs, not members.
Of the 526,000 people who crossed the border illegally last year, just 228 were arrested and identified as MS-13. 
5.There is no truth to the claim that immigration drives crime. Numerous studies show immigrants commit less crime than native born Americans (news.wisc.edu/study-shows-un…), and areas that have more immigrants today have fewer violent crimes. (nytimes.com/interactive/20…)
In sum, there is no explosion of drug, sex trafficking, or gang activity. Gang and gun violence affect Mexicans and Central Americans far more than Americans. Violent crime has been dropping for decades. None of these things are linked. So why are we talking about them at all?
Because to simply mention immigration and crime in the same sentence is a way to poison the political conversation. It creates a perception of a relationship that isn’t there. Even rebuttals like this one help keep these two unrelated things together in the public’s mind.
Trump and his defenders want the public to associate immigrants with crime in order to justify any anti-immigrant measures, up to and including caging children. They cherry pick random and unrelated stories and make up figures to invent false trends.
The more sensational stories they tell, involving sex panics and gore, the easier it is to dehumanize an entire population, and convince Americans that the toddlers they see in cages are threats, not people. [/end]
cc: @hannahdreier @NickMiroff @DLind @Noahpinion @AlexNowrasteh @gsiskind @aurabogado @elisefoley @aflores @SenatorMenendez @pdmcleod @TheTinaVasquez perhaps of interest
