WHY CAN'T WE DEPORT MORE WHITE CRIMINAL ALIENS?

National Review

 

Why Can’t We Deport More White Criminal Aliens?

By Rich Lowry

January 29, 2025 12:39 PM

 

The race-obsessives denounce Trump’s deportations.

 

The progressive response to President Trump’s deportations is just getting under way, and it’s already dumb and hysterical.

 

Tom Homan wants to be Bull Connor, don’t you know? (So opined Princeton University’s Eddie Glaude.) According to Nicole Wallace and Joy Reid, we are potentially headed down the path of another Holocaust. “Similarities to what happened in Germany and what’s happening now in America are just undeniable,” Reid said the other day.

 

A common refrain is that the criminal illegal aliens who are being targeted in the early raids are overwhelmingly black and brown, proving that something nefarious is afoot. Leave it to progressives to see in these deportees not, first and foremost, violent offenders who represent a threat to the public, but people of color who are inherently victims.

 

Al Sharpton asserted on Morning Joe — the formerly interesting morning political chat program that has given itself over almost entirely to progressive agitprop — “that there’s a serious element of profiling here, that we’re looking for people of a certain black or brown color.”

 

Also, on Morning Joe, showing the great diversity of opinion on the program, journalist Anand Giridharadas declared that the goal of Trump’s immigration policy is “to make America white again.”

 

On The View, Sunny Hostin explained that the Trump deportations are going out of their way to target “a certain group or type of immigrant.” Hostin believes that that are a lot of Asian and European visa-overstayers who are getting off scot-free while the administration goes after immigrants coming over the border because of the color of their skin.

 

“So I think there’s a very clear message as to what this president wants the look of a criminal migrant to look like,” she said, adding that “I think that’s racist,” to the applause of the studio audience.

 

This is predictably ill-informed. According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 2022, 80 percent of all illegal immigrants in the United States were from Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

The top five countries of origin were Mexico (45 percent of illegals), Guatemala (7 percent), El Salvador (6 percent), Honduras (5 percent), and India (3 percent). No European country made the top ten. Altogether, illegal immigrants from Europe, Canada, and Oceania were 7 percent.

 

There was shifting around in these numbers during the Biden influx, with increases in the number of illegals from every region of the world while the Mexican contribution declined.

 

Still, the picture is overwhelmingly of non-white illegal immigrants, who are coming from poor countries with some geographical proximity to us. This is simply a fact. It has nothing to do with how Trump “wants” illegal immigrants to look. If ICE undertakes entirely randomized raids, 80 percent of the people it finds are going to be black and brown.

 

Now, of course, the raids aren’t random — they, for now, are largely, if not entirely, targeting criminal aliens.

 

As a general matter, criminal offending is associated with low levels of education and socio-economic status. That, of course, doesn’t mean that all poor people are criminals. But you are likelier to get in trouble with the law if you are an immigrant who hasn’t graduated high school compared with one who has a medical degree. (The same is true of the U.S. born.)

 

So, why — to take Hostin more seriously than she deserves — isn’t ICE cuffing lots of Indian illegal immigrants right now? If we assume that the demographic characteristics of Indian illegal immigrants are broadly consonant with — although not exactly the same as — Indian immigrants generally, they’ll have a different profile than illegal immigrants from other places.

 

The Migration Policy Institute notes, “On average, Indian immigrants are highly skilled and earn significant incomes: the vast majority hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, their median income is more than double that of the U.S.- and overall foreign-born populations, and their likelihood of living in poverty is half that of these groups.”

 

Hostin cited visa-overstayers, and there are a fair amount from Canada. But, again, they are travelers and students coming from a relatively affluent, well-educated country and so are unlikely to be mixed up with, say, prison gangs. What’s the French-Canadian equivalent of Tren de Aragua?

 

Of course, every illegal immigrant should be subject to deportation, but however we draw the line, the criminal migrant, as Hostin put it, is never going to look how she and fellow race-obsessed commentators want.

 

The logic of their view is that it’s racist to keep out non-white illegal immigrants, racist to make them go, and, at the end of the day, racist to have a country that takes its borders seriously.

 

And they wonder why they are losing.