Not a response to any actual problem

Paul Krugman wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about the nasty guy’s brutal policies on immigrants and their children. He then looks at the wider issue:

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.

Krugman notes that crime in general is at historic lows since 2014. There is also a negative correlation between violent crime and the prevalence of undocumented immigrants – the more immigrants there are in an area the lower the crime rate. Criminal conviction data shows immigrants, legal and not, are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the native-born.

So the Trump administration has been terrorizing families and children, abandoning all norms of human decency, in response to a crisis that doesn’t even exist.
…
I don’t know what drives such people — but we’ve seen this movie before, in the history of anti-Semitism.

The thing about anti-Semitism is that it was never about anything Jews actually did. It was always about lurid myths, often based on deliberate fabrications, that were systematically spread to engender hatred.
…
In any case, the important thing to understand is that the atrocities our nation is now committing at the border don’t represent an overreaction or poorly implemented response to some actual problem that needs solving. There is no immigration crisis; there is no crisis of immigrant crime.

No, the real crisis is an upsurge in hatred — unreasoning hatred that bears no relationship to anything the victims have done. And anyone making excuses for that hatred — who tries, for example, to turn it into a “both sides” story — is, in effect, an apologist for crimes against humanity.

Though Krugman doesn’t know what drives people like the nasty guy, I do. I’ve mentioned it many times on this blog. They are highly obsessed with ranking and maintaining their place in it by cruelly oppressing those who they declare should be lower in rank.