Democratic cities and states learned how to oppose federal immigration enforcement policy under the Obama administration where they had a lot of practice. Those jurisdictions then ramped it up in opposition to Trump. Combined with Trumpian blundering, y’all got this result.
OTOH, Trump was much more successful reducing legal immigration. He radically reduced the number of greencards issued to immigrants abroad.
A common counter-theme is that the Capitol insurrectionists were punished more harshly than the BLM rioters, or at least criticized more. 1/
According to that narrative, BLM rioters ran roughshod in American cities & received zero punishment so of course the Capitol Putschists thought they could get away with it. 2/
Obviously, the BLM rioters were awful & they deserve(d) to be punished for the harm they committed – but is this true? How can we approach understanding this? 3/
What does this even mean? There’s a lot of evidence that the 1918 pandemic started in Kansas, how would that have been a policy failure for the US at the time?
Many countries, including the US, have severe travel & immigration restrictions on China. Trump has raised tariffs (that Americans pay). They’re the most closed off they’ve been since joining the WTO.
Since 2002, right-wing terrorists have murdered 66 people in the U.S. During the same time, Islamist terrorists have murdered 107. Murders in RW terrorist attacks have increased in recent years, but so have deaths in Islamist attacks.
In 2015-2017, murders by Islamist terrorists outnumbered murders by RW terrorists (80-19). In 2018, murders by RW terrorists outnumbered those by Islamist terrorists (12-0).
I included anti-abortion, nationalists, white nationalists, and white supremacists/Nazis in the RW definition.
Thread --> President Trump's press event with the Angel Families was shameless political showmanship intended to show the world that illegal immigrants are a serious criminal threat. However, all the evidence we have shows that illegal immigrants are less crime-prone than natives
Our first point comes from Texas, which tracks criminal convictions/arrests by legal status. As a percentage of their respective populations, there were 56 percent fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of native-born Americans in 2015. cato.org/publications/i…
We also separated it out by crime. In 2015, homicide conviction rates for illegal and legal immigrants were 25 percent and 87 percent below those of natives, respectively. This is also as a percent of their respective populations.
The chance of being murdered by a foreign-born terrorist in an attack on US soil is 1 in 3.4 million per year (1982-2018). The chance of being murdered in a mass shooting during that time is 1 in 12.9 million per year (excluding San Bernardino terror). Both are small hazards.
Mass shootings prompt debates over gun control but they only account for a fraction of a percent of all homicides annually. Control advocates have much better arguments for restricting gun ownership than mass shootings (I disagree with them, but they have serious arguments).
To the people affected, the hazard of mass shootings is the only one. I understand that. These tweets will make me no friends but it’s important to realize the scale of this problem. Only then can we actually compare the costs of private gun ownership to the benefits.