Eric Schlosser writes:

Three weeks ago, Donald Trump attended the opening of an immigrant-detention center in the Florida Everglades, about 50 miles west of Miami. “Pretty soon, this facility will handle the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” the president said. Officially named Alligator Alcatraz, it was constructed in eight days by the state of Florida on a disused airport runway. The detention center features tents that contain chain-link cages crammed with bunk beds, surrounded by miles of barbed wire. By the end of August, it may have the capacity to hold 4,000 people waiting to hear whether they’ll be deported.

On Fox News that night, Stephen Miller, the White House’s deputy chief of staff for policy, argued that there was nothing dehumanizing about an immigrant-detention center built in a hot, humid, mosquito-infested, subtropical wetland. “What is dehumanizing is when Democrats let illegal alien rapists into the country to attack our children,” Miller said. Laura Loomer, a Trump adviser, expressed the hope that alligators would eat the immigrants detained in the Everglades. “Alligator lives matter,” she posted on X, along with an implied threat to the Latino population of the United States: “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.”

The Everglades detention center, the nationwide roundups of immigrants, the massive increase in spending for ICE, and the Trump administration’s harsh rhetoric were foreshadowed during the 2024 presidential campaign. “This is country changing; it’s country threatening; and it’s country wrecking,” Trump said about undocumented immigration at one campaign rally. At another he said, “It’s a massive invasion at our southern border that has spread misery, crime, poverty, disease, and destruction to communities all across our land.” Trump called immigrants “animals,” accused them of stealing and eating pet dogs and cats, and claimed that they were “poisoning the blood of our country.” These claims helped ensure Trump’s election. Last year, an opinion poll commissioned by CBS News found that almost half of all adults in the United States agreed that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. More than three-quarters of Republican adults agreed.

I’ve been writing about the role of undocumented immigrants in the American economy for 30 years. They are the bedrock of our food, construction, and hospitality industries. They are also some of the nation’s poorest, most vulnerable, most devout, most family-oriented workers in the U.S. They routinely suffer wage theft, minimum-wage violations, sexual harassment on the job, and workplace injuries that go unreported and uncompensated. Most of them have lived here for more than a decade. The lies now being spread about them are too numerous to mention. But one that must be addressed is the falsehood at the heart of Trump’s immigration policy: that undocumented immigrants are likely to be murderers, rapists, and violent criminals who wreak havoc upon law-abiding citizens.

A recent study of 150 years of American incarceration data, from 1870 to 2020, found that immigrant men were far less likely to be sent to prison than men born in the U.S. Since 1990, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has roughly tripled—yet the homicide rate has fallen by almost 50 percent. A 2020 study published in the journal PNAS compared the crime rates of undocumented immigrants in Texas with the crime rates of U.S.-born citizens there. “Relative to undocumented immigrants,” the study found, U.S.-born citizens “are over 2 times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over 4 times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.” That helps explain why crackdowns on undocumented immigration aren’t the most effective way to improve public safety. Texas would be a much safer place if everyone born in Texas got deported. [Continue reading…]