AMY GOODMAN: Well, let’s go to Donald Trump calling for this new government agency for
victims of crime by immigrants.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And we must support the victims of crime.
I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American
victims.
The office is called VOICE, Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement.
We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media and silenced by
special interests.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Kelly Lytle Hernández, your comments on this, the idea that President
Trump has repeatedly trumpeted that immigrants commit more crimes?
KELLY LYTLE HERNÁNDEZ: Well, that’s factually untrue.
We have research out of the Pew Research Center and out of the TRAC researchers from Syracuse
University and many others, who have repeatedly documented that immigrants have a lower crime
rate than native-born U.S. citizens.
So, that is just factually untrue.
What’s really happening here is a demonization campaign and a criminalization campaign, trying
to lift up and put a spotlight on a small number of tragic crimes impacting U.S. citizens,
meaning the usually—he’s talking about the killing of U.S. citizens by undocumented
immigrants.
And he’s highlighting it in a way to demonize an entire population, immigrant population,
namely Muslim and Latino immigrants—I would suspect, to shore up his broader policies
on immigration restriction.
So, this is a historically familiar act, that these kinds of criminalization campaigns have
always preceded immigrant exclusion.
We can go back to the Chinese Exclusion Acts, where folks in the American West, in particular,
demonized Chinese immigrants as opium dealers, and then that led to support for the Chinese
Exclusion Acts and mass deportation of Chinese immigrants.
We can also go back to the early 20th century, when Italian immigrants were demonized as
being biologically criminal and inferior, leading to the Immigration Control Act or
the National Origins Act of 1924, which largely prohibited Italian immigrants from entering
the United States.
So this is historically consistent.
AMY GOODMAN: And scholars also say Trump’s proposed list of crimes committed by immigrants
recalls Nazi Germany-era policy, where the Nazi Institute for Research on the Jewish
Question kept files on crimes committed by Jews.
We recently spoke to Andrea Pitzer.
Her upcoming book is called One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.
ANDREA PITZER: This weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things
from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then
vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it.
When he—I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his
candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has
been a theme throughout.
And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called—a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer,
and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories
of supposed Jewish crimes.
And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic
illustrations of these crimes, as well.
And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which
the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted
beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal
Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented
different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews.
So this preoccupation with focusing in on one subset of the population’s crimes and
then depicting that as somehow depraved and abnormal from the main population is something
we’ve seen quite a bit in the past.
AMY GOODMAN: So that’s Andrea Pitzer.
Her upcoming book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.
Again, we’re talking about President Trump announcing he has set up the VOICE office,
"VOICE" standing for Victims of Immigration—Immigrant Crime Engagement.
Professor Sachs?
JEFFREY SACHS: I thought what was interesting was there was a loud groan when he said that,
throughout the chamber, not an applause, nothing, because that one is so absurd, so transparently
phony, that while the Republicans were jumping up and down at every bit of nonsense, that
was nonsense too far.