When Donald Trump, with exacting calculation based on an understanding of the Big Lie as the keystone of effective propaganda, began his election campaign by declaring that "Mexicans are criminals...they are rapists," he was openly courting the racist, fascist element of US society, dormant and nearly forgotten for many years, with a Lie so outrageously false that it would have seemed absurd, to the ignorant and gullible ("I love the poorly educated!" who it must be true for who would tell such a huge lie? That is the psychopathology of political propaganda, as Trump learned it reading Hitler's speeches, as reported by his ex-wife (Trump said in an interview:" I don't have the book (he had just said a Jew gave it to him) and if I did, I didn't read it."
Sanctuary cities and counties
He did have the book, The New Order, a collection of Hitler's most effective propaganda speeches.
When Trump began his campaign claiming undocumented Mexicans were vicious criminals, and then visited a border city praising himself for his courage since border cities are the most dangerous, he was 180 degrees wrong.
Here, in brief, are the facts I uncovered using the Bureau of Prisons and neighborhoodscout.com data:
1. The crime rate for undocumented immigrants is 50% lower than for US natives
2. Most incarcerated undocumented immigrants, the vast majority, over 90%, are in for non-violent crimes, primarily lack of documentation and secondly drug possession (and sometimes sales). The murder rate for undocumented immigrants, in 2013, was 99.9% lower than US citizens, as the FBI reported 14,138 murders and the Bureau of Prisons reported unauthorized immigrants had committed 8 murders.
The border cities in Texas are 2/3 less violent than the inland cities, and the largest border city in the US, San Diego, with a high proportion of undocumented immigrants (roughly 10% of the city) is, year after year, the safest big city in the nation. Los Angeles, which has the largest population New York and neighboring cities have slightly more) of any single city, more than a million, has seen its murder rate drop from 34 per 100K in 1980, when there were far fewer undocumented immigrants (now about one in six residents) to 6.3 per 100K, a drop of about 75%. Today, there are more undocumented immigrants in LA than ever.
So the Big Lie was to call the most law-abiding and peaceful population in the nation "criminals and rapists."
Each year, US citizens murder about 14,000 of each other while the undocumented murder around 10. Few of the 14,000 are noted but each murder, less than 1 a month in a nation with over 1000 murders a month, is headline news. Thus the media promotes the Big Lie in its own way.
Goebbels 18th principle of propaganda is to displace anger (at global oligarchs like Trump whose workforce is 95% offshore in slave labor nations, earning as little as $60 a month in Bangladesh garment factory/firetraps) and focus it on a defenseless population like the Jews (.06% of the German population) or in the US, those denied legal protection.
Displace anger onto targets of hate. The issue, as Hitler made clear, is not the truth, but to win, to successfully redirect resentment at deteriorating standards of living onto those who cannot protect themselves.
And it worked.
El Paso is the largest border city in Texas; it has 1/3 the violent crime of inland cities: "- Major cities across the state of Texas have seen an increase in homicides, while El Paso merely experienced minor fluctuations.
El Paso saw a minor increase with 18 homicides in 2016, compared to 16 in the year prior."
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