Most people would think shooting and killing other humans is a very serious matter and not something that we want to do under any circumstance. And I would hope that we would hold our elected officials to an even higher standard. Though apparently, that’s ideal thinking. Texas Governor Abbott is once again proving why he’s totally cruel and honestly unfit for office.
Republicans use migrants as a political prop to stoke fear all the time, as a way to push their political agenda. We know this. But Abbott has been particularly egregious on this issue, coming from a border state. His latest comments show just how disturbing his views really are. On a podcast with National Rifle Association spokesperson Dana Loesch, Abbott said his administration has been using “every tool” to limit migration into Texas.
“The only thing that we’re not doing,” he went on to say, “is we’re not shooting people who come across the border, because of course the Biden administration would charge us with murder.” Um … WHAT?
So I am glad that Biden, painted here as some kind of killjoy, and the potential for charges is holding back a sitting governor’s desire to shoot people en masse but … does Abbott know that we can hear him? Or maybe he doesn’t genuinely see anything wrong with this. Fortunately, there is still a Democratic party in the state, and they quickly condemned his remarks. The chair of the party gave a blistering statement, saying, “Time and time again, Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans have made it abundantly clear they have no morality or humanity.”
Republicans are constantly trying to convince American voters that migrants pose a direct threat to them and their safety. This is fear-mongering and it’s straight-forwardly false. Stanford economist Ran Abramitzky recently revealed substantial research on the crime myths associated with immigrants. One of the most important overarching findings refutes the right-wing talking point that immigration causes crime spikes. That hasn’t been true in this country for 140 years. Oops!
Abramitzky’s study also found that in today’s America, immigrants are 30 percent less likely to be incarcerated than American-born white people—a.k.a. Republicans’ favorite kind of person. An important note is that the rates have increased since 2005 for Mexican and Central American immigrants, BUT that is mostly attributed to census data, including detentions as part of overall crime and incarceration stats.
Either way, Abbott’s disgusting rhetoric cannot be overstated. Democrats sometimes say “cruelty is the point” when they refer to Trump and his policies and we have to extend that to most Republicans at this point. They don’t want to focus on policies that have the highest positive utility, they want to drive wedges between Americans that are stoked in hate because they are counting on the worst within the American, not the best. And that is a real shame.
(via HuffPost, featured image: Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)
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