Edgar Chen and Dan Ross write:

From the moment Donald Trump descended his gilded escalator to launch his first presidential campaign in 2015, impugning immigrants as criminals has been the centerpiece of his political identity. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” he said that day.

This year, “migrant crime” has become a cornerstone of Trump’s campaign. Moments after he became a convicted felon himself in May, Trump took the opportunity not only to attack the justice system but to single out immigrants as criminals, stating that the country has “gone to hell” and blaming “millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now from prisons and from mental institutions, terrorists.”

Such invective flagrantly mischaracterizes the U.S. immigration process. Notwithstanding evidence that immigrants are generally more law-abiding than native-born Americans, the U.S. immigration system is preoccupied with barring criminal – or even suspected criminal – conduct. These bars are so strict that Trump himself, were he an immigrant and subject to the same scrutiny as those he now maligns, would be at high risk of being either refused entry, denied a green card, or rejected for citizenship.

Ironically, the U.S. political system sets lower standards for those who seek to lead the country than to join it. But an examination of Trump’s history through the prism of the U.S. immigration system is not just a hypothetical exercise. It demonstrates the stringency of the current system, the level of vetting to which immigrants are subject, and that Trump’s relentless equivalence of immigration with criminality is baseless. [Continue reading…]