Who better to advance Fox’s jingoistic hate mongering directed towards immigrants than white-privilege poster boy, Tucker Carlson, who recently used misleading statistics to inform us that immigrants are a bunch of scary criminals who need to stay the hell out of the USA?
Last week, to a background photo of a young man jumping over barbed wire and the words “Illegal Alien Crime,” Carlson set the anti-immigration tone: “We’ve got brand new numbers, striking numbers that have never been seen before and they reshape how you think about illegal immigration.” He cited what he described as a left-wing mantra about how immigrants work hard and obey the law. As he spoke, video which supposedly showed “illegals” coming into the country, was shown.
After reciting what he described as liberal myths about “illegals” being superior to “real” Americans, Carlson set the table for the upcoming propaganda: “But wait, are we sure that that is true? Are people who are in this country precisely because they were willing to break our immigration laws really less likely to break other kinds of laws?”
While Carlson claimed that nobody has ascertained the validity of this supposed liberal myth, there is research to support this. He snarked about government keeping data on everything but not the volume of crime committed by “illegals” (The US Sentencing Commission has 2015 numbers) because the government might be either “incompetent" or "They didn’t want you to know the answer.” (Nice conspiracy) He later proclaimed, “No, immigrants are not more law abiding and less dangerous than Americans” and asked “Why have so many people have been lying to us about this for so long?”
He presented new federal crime data, from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, which, he claimed, show that non-citizens (not all are “illegal” – some have status) are “far more likely” to commit crimes. The header for his background visual was taken from Trump’s nativist campaign announcement: “Not Their Best People.” Using a small set of federal crime (28,000 non-citizens in a total of 67,202), Carlson asserted that non-citizens are more likely to be arrested, convicted, and imprisoned. He asked, “Why have so many people been lying to us for so long.”
Carlson later spoke with Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, a non-partisan immigration organization. As with so many of Carlson’s guests, Noorani served as a foil for a smug and self-righteous Carlson to further advance his hateful message.
Rather than addressing Noorani’s points, Carlson continued to claim, “We’re letting in the wrong people” and to "ask" why we don't “radically curtail immigration into this country.”
Noorani’s attempts to have a rational discussion were met with mockery, scripted outrage, and the constant refrain that we haven’t been told the truth about the danger of immigrants.
In another segment of the show, Carlson spoke with anti-Immigrant Mark Steyn who joined Carlson in a lot of yelling and chest-thumping about how, according to Steyn, America is “importing a criminal class” and that the government is hiding this from us due to political correctness.
FACT CHECK: Carlson’s stats are not what they seem. Here's some important information that Carlson, the supposed sworn enemy of group think and smugness somehow left out. According to The New York Times, “State and local prisons and jails hold approximately 90 percent of the country’s total incarcerated population, according to the Justice Department, and the vast majority of violent crimes such as murders, assaults and rapes are prosecuted at the local, not federal, level."
Politifact, in rebutting a Hannity lie, quotes a person from the U.S. Sentencing Commission: “If you take out the immigration crimes, you find that illegal aliens committed about 14% of all non-immigration federal crimes."
But these facts don’t fit with Carlson’s agenda and on Fox, the agenda Trumps (!) everything!
Watch the distortion below, from the December 21, 2017 Tucker Carlson Tonight.
Crossposted at News Hounds.
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