I am proud to say that I passed three out of four semesters of college French courses.
That means I am, or once was, somewhat fluent in TWO more languages than our most recent former president uses.
The latest nonsense to cascade in a disorderly tumble from his lips adds an additional damnation to immigrants who, he has claimed, “are coming from jails, and they’re coming from prisons, and they’re coming from mental institutions, and they’re coming from insane asylums, and they’re terrorists.”
Of course, he never offers any proof of such things. Now, during that same visit to an area near Eagle Pass, Texas on the southern border, he is piling on:
“Nobody can explain to me how allowing millions of people from places unknown, from countries unknown, who don’t speak languages. We have languages coming into our country. We have nobody that even speaks those languages. They’re truly foreign languages. Nobody speaks them, and they’re pouring into our country, and they’re bringing with them tremendous problems, including medical problems, as you know.” He has asserted in a previous rant that when one migrant showed u, “We don’t even have one translator who could understand this language.”
Various media outlets, including the once-chummy FOX News Channel, jumped all over that disjointed estrangement from reality, one of the fact-checkers being CNN’s Daniel Dale who found the comment about a translator, “nonsense,” and said it had been “conjured out of thin air.”
The former president says people such as Dale shouldn’t taken him so seriously. He told Sean Hannity recently, “You take a look at when I use Barack Hussein Obama and I interject him into where it’s supposed to be Biden, and I do it purposely for comedic reasons and for sarcasm.”
Whew! That’s a relief. I hope all of his MAGA friends realize he’s just pulling their legs and don’t bother repeating his fun-loving remarks as serious messages.
About those languages that nobody speaks:
Analyst Philip Bump with The Washington Post wrote last week that the former president’s remarks were “remarkable” and proved again that “there is no limit on the fearmongering Donald Trump will deploy when it comes to the U.S.-Mexican border.”
Bump points out that there’s a CIA database that includes the spoken languages of more than 220 places. Here’s an interesting statistic he cites from that database: Canada, which has two official languages (English and French) “has a higher percentage of English speakers than the United States has of people who speak only the language.” He says only about seven percent of our population speaks something other than English or Spanish.
Bu contrast, about 30% of Canadians speak French. About 16% of Canadians use both languages. Four percent speak Chinese. Three percent speak Spanish with an equal amount speaking Punjabi. Arabic, Tagalog, and Italian are spoken by two percent each.
The truth, he says, is that “fewer people speak less frequently-spoken languages. Therefore, those people are less likely to arrive at the U.S.-Mexican border. If they did so, though, there seem to be good odds that someone within the federal government (much less the broader population would be able to understand what they’re saying.”
On top of that, the State Department has translators in some 140 languages or combinations of languages. “The CIA, meanwhile, has an incentive program to encourage people who speak particular languages to work with them. If you speak Baluchi (spoken in Oman) or Ewe (Togo and Ghana) or Lingala (both Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo), ping your local CIA recruiter. There’s cash in it for you.”
As far as immigrants being criminals or more likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans—as the ex-President claimed in his Texas speech, Terry Collins wrote this week in USA Today that research indicates immigrants “actually commit fewer crimes than people born in the U. S.”
Trump and his supporters are quick to capitalize on a serious crime committed by an undocumented immigrant, such as the high-profile murder in Georgia.
But Collins points to the work of immigration policy analyst Alex Nowrasteh with the Cato Institute, a self-described “Libertarian think tank,” who says, ‘The findings show pretty consistently undocumented and illegal immigrants have a lower conviction rate and are less likely to be convicted of homicide and other crimes overall compared to native-born Americans in Texas.”
“They’re coming from jails and they’re coming from prisons and they’re coming from mental institutions and they’re coming from insane asylums and they’re terrorists,” Trump said in Eagle Pass.
He clearly has never heard of Nowrasteh, whose studies of undocumented immigrants from 2012-2022 show undocumented immigrants have a homicide rate fourteen percent under that of native-born citizens and a 41% lower total conviction rate. Legal immigrants have a 62% lower homicide rate
He told Collins, “I don’t think that Trump’s statements accurately convey the reality of immigration.”
The problem with all of this is that a lot of Americans are buying what the ex-president is selling. The Pew Research Center, in a survey a few weeks ago, found that 57% of Americans think immigration leads to more crime.
Here’s some more research reported by Collins:
Stanford University Economics Professor Ran Abramitzky’s research shows the rates of crimes committed by immigrants in this country have been lower than those committed by native-born Americans. Incarceration rates have been dropping for the last six decades. Nowrasteh says there’s a powerful reason for that: “Deportation is a hefty penalty, as being removed and sent back to their home country where they have fewer job and quality of life opportunities is enough to scare most immigrants.”
As far as criminals crossing the border in droves—-
The Border Patrol checks for criminal backgrounds before releasing them to enter this country, pending a hearing. The Patrol arrested more than 15,000 people with criminal records at the border last year, three-thousand more than in ’22. So far this year, the number is more than 5,600.
Responsible people who know what they are talking about know that our border is not a sieve that leaks insane criminals who have been released from prisons throughout the world to come here and “poison” our country. It is not to our credit that we would listen to an irresponsible monolingual figure who hopes we drink HIS poison instead.