Noem's fear roadshow plays a date downstate

    

Barbara Kruger, Art Institute of Chicago

If you could be exiled from your home forever for a speeding ticket, how fast would you drive? If the slightest brush with the law might result in you being torn from your family and sent to a country you last saw when you were 2, how cautiously would you go about your day?
     I mention this because, in the first draft of this column, I began with the hard statistics demonstrating that immigrants, as a group, are more law-abiding than citizens born in the United States. It just makes sense; they have to be.
     But numbers are cold, while stories sizzle.
     This is not to suggest immigrants never commit crimes. Awful crimes. They do. They are, after all, still human beings — that privilege has not been snatched away from them, yet. Though according to the script we're following, that is coming next.
    But one example — or three — is proof of nothing. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is oblivious to that, and hopes you are too. She brought her Immigrants = Criminals Tour roadshow to Springfield Wednesday to complain about our state's policy of not helping federal immigration officers randomly pluck immigrants off the street and ship them to foreign countries to suffer fates unknown for the crime of not having their paperwork in order. Or having their paperwork in order and being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
     “People are dying every day because of these policies. People are evading justice,” Noem told reporters during a news conference near the scene of a murder committed, allegedly, by an immigrant. As if "evading justice" weren't a contender for a chapter heading summarizing our current political nadir in some future history textbook. "Evading Justice — America in the era of blatant official criminality, 2025 — 2029."
     Assuming we have accurate history books, which right now is no sure bet.
     Noem went on to fire off the administration blunderbuss of false invective.
     “Governors like JB Pritzker don’t care if gangbangers, murderers, rapists and pedophiles roam free in his state," she said.
     Initially, I grabbed a handful of statistics to throw back. How immigrants are 60 percent less likely to wind up in jail than citizens born here. But figures are complicated, when you dwell in the world of fact, there are many asterisks — the figure could be 30%. Or 40%.

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That's why so many Americans prefer to live in fantasyland of lies — truth is complicated. Life is so simple when you can just make it up.