It’s the day after the first and perhaps only debate between Vice President Kamala Harris (D) and one-time Electoral College winner Donald Trump (R). The local news broadcasts here in Michigan have been predictably both-sideist.
By now it should quite clear that Trump can’t win on character, because he’s got none. But he can still win by slandering undocumented immigrants, accusing them of horrific crimes, and terrifying common folks that their loved ones might be murdered by so-called “illegals.”
CBS local news sent a reporter to talk to people around Michigan. In Dearborn, he talked to a woman who seemed sincere in her fear that undocumented immigrants will soon murder much of her family, talking about such immigrants as if they were monsters from a horror movie, pouring in by the thousands through the supposedly open borders, unrelenting in their inexorable journey to kill everywhere they go.
Apparently, the reporter did not push back on this, did not try to calm that woman’s irrational fear. But worse, the news broadcast did nothing to provide sorely needed context for the viewers at home. Context such as that most undocumented immigrants are in this country doing important but thankless work, and that most of them are not here to commit crime.
Fearing that one of your relatives is going to be killed by an undocumented immigrant is like fearing they’re going to be killed by lightning. It’s a thing that can happen, but it’s also a thing that is unlikely to happen. It is far more likely for someone fearing a so-called “invasion” to be killed by an American-born person they know. Or to die in an accident due to their own stupidity or negligence.
Can someone please stand up and defend the undocumented immigrants? Some of them are coming to the United States to escape violence in their own countries, not to perpetrate violence here. And a lot of them are here because American corporations want them here, to do work that American-born citizens don’t want to do.
As a prosecutor in California, Kamala Harris prosecuted criminals, and dealt with each of them as the law required. But if she was ever less than perfect in the performance of her job, allowing a criminal to escape who she could have theoretically convicted, we’re supposed to instead vote for Donald Trump, a convicted felon who pardoned criminals who then went on to commit more violent crimes? It’s a nonsensical proposition.
And yet some people might still fall for it. And if Trump wins, it will not matter whether those voters honestly believed the lies or merely went along with it because they were dazzled by the purity of Trump’s hatred and wanted him to become the first American dictator.
If Trump wins, it’s going to be one of those “but I said nothing” situations. In the mad rush to deport the “illegals,” some documented immigrants and even some naturalized and born American citizens are going to be deported, perhaps to countries they have never been to before.
Trump was able to win the Electoral College in 2016 with vague insinuations against Hillary Clinton. Like, who knows or understands what was in the e-mails that was supposedly so bad?
But against Harris this year, Trump could actually win by demonizing hard-working undocumented immigrants and painting Harris as the champion of the few criminals among those undocumented immigrants.
When Dan Rosenberg appears on TV, dishonoring the memory of his son Drew and claiming that Harris was directly responsible for Drew’s death by an undocumented driver (who, by the way, could just as easily have been an American-born driver), people know and understand what that means on a visceral level. And it scares them.
If enough people in enough swing states are frightened by Trump’s irresponsible demonization of undocumented immigrants, that might just propel the convicted felon and suspected traitor to another Electoral College victory overriding the popular vote.
