On Migration, Immigration, and the Right to Criticize Governors

A few days ago I made a post on my own FB page that was linked to an editorial in the Dallas News. The editorial was critical of Texas Governor Gregg Abbot, and I added my own thoughts about Abbot, who is not somebody for whom I have much admiration. Subsequently a FB friend shared the post, including my own comment. A couple days later I got a provocative response from a friend of my friend, who took umbrage at my comments about the good governor. I’ve been busy with research here in Chichicastenango, and didn’t have a chance to answer him for a couple of days. But taking advantage of an off-day in my research and work at the office down the hill, I got around to responding to the comment. In my characteristic way I got lost in my thoughts and writing, and ended up with a tome that is not appropriate for a friend’s FB page … but which I think is fine for a blogpost. So I’m sharing it here – starting with the provocative response to my post. I have edited out names in the interest of privacy

RESPONSE from Friend of Friend:
Max Kintner , let me ask you this , if Texas politics are so bad then why is the state growing so much ? Why is our economy doing as well as it is . Your Facebook page says you were from Texas but now live up north . That being said you don’t see what the so call immigrants/ illegals do to our great state . I have been the Chief of my local Fire Dept for ten years , firefighter since 1984 . The amount of traffic accidents caused by someone that is here illegally will blow your mind , no driver license, no insurance , no English but think they can come into our state and beat people up , run over them in cars and break our laws and we should just welcome them in is crazy . I see it when we work an accident where a illegal woman runs over a motorcycle and kills a young woman , where there is a car load of them and they flip a car and none can speak English but were driving a new car with a new I Phone . Where when the Highway Patrol approaches you need to have ahold of them so they don’t run off into the brush with half their leg tore off . This is just the tip of the iceberg . As Chief I scan the Law , Fire and EMS channels so we can get a heads up on traffic accidents and head that way . I hear this stuff daily . Don’t try to run down our state or it’s elected leaders .

MY RESPONSE:

Greetings from Guatemala, …. where over the last 29 years I’ve lived and worked fulltime for a number of years and in the other years used my vacation from a paying job in the US to work – usually on a voluntary basis – with education, public health, and most recently mental health and domestic violence projects in an effort to keep young people from migrating to the States.  I debated whether to respond to your comment or not, in part because my schedule here is very busy; in  part because I don’t want to engage in a long argument on a friend’s FB page; and in part because it’s certain from the outset that neither of us is going to change our mind.   But I decided to make a one-shot reply, because I think it’s important to make clear to other folks that the reality you describe is no doubt real to you, but is not supported by much observable evidence. 

That’s important to me, because I’m an overeducated social scientist who collects and relies on verifiable data to make conclusions.  I’m well aware that’s not the methodology used by Abbot or his soul brother, Trump, or their followers, who prefer to latch onto cultural preferences and call them facts.  Or alternatively, to latch onto social and demographic trends that really are facts for one sector of people, and use those trends in broad-brush fashion to make hasty conclusions about what is and isn’t true.  The migration of Californians (and to a lesser extent, New York) to Texas is one such fact.  That really is happening, although not in the cataclysmic exodus some of the comments on my friend’s FB page suggest.   I’d rather talk about immigration and your governor.  But I did take the time to look for some factual information from trustworthy conservative sources (meaning something other than Fox or Breitbart etc), and found a recent article from National Review – a publication whose intellectual integrity I admire despite more often than not disagreeing with its basic conservative assumptions and conclusions. This article, attached here, proposes that the California migrants to Texas are a mix of frustrated conservatives, and people who are affected by the increasing cost of living – particularly of real estate – in California. 

I understand the economic motives.  It’s worth pointing out, though, that the increasing cost of living in California is more the result of that state’s enormous economic success and inability to keep up with demand than because of regulatory issues or disagreement with prevailing political philosophy.  In any event, I’m pretty sure that the reason most of them come to Texas is not strongly related to their distaste for California’s liberalism, because what the data tells us with some certainty is that the majority of relatively affluent migrants from other states are moving to suburbs and bedroom communities of the Bluest and Purplest pockets of Texas – Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston, Bryan/College Station, and Midland/Odessa. 

I assume they’re moving to these pockets of blue and purple because that’s where the jobs are, and the migration is not driven by an impulse for ideological communion with Texan political diversity, such as it is.  But I highly doubt that the relocation of frustrated conservative Californians to Texas is going to affect the political map and demographic trends enough to change those areas back to hard-right-red.  And beyond that, I think it’s worthwhile asking the chicken/egg question about whether economic boom areas are more socially progressive because liberals come, or is it that liberals are by nature more innovative and enterprising and create jobs? In either case, I feel confident that not too much should be read into this migration, and Texas will continue its steady progress toward centrist liberalism – led by growing liberalism in the Texas cities that out-of-state conservatives are moving to.

WHICH brings me to a good segue to the other part of your response to my FB post, which is that, as noted above, I’m an overeducated social scientist with a hearty respect for hard data.  And when I look for data to indicate increased crime levels due to undocumented aliens, it’s Simply. Not. There.  Not ANYWHERE.  It doesn’t matter how you spin the data.  I scanned the sources again this morning just to make sure there hasn’t been a spike in the last few months, and nope, there isn’t.   So my assumption has to be that, as the CATO Institute document suggests, your anecdotal evidence just can’t be borne out by anybody seeking to use serious evidence to shape policy. 

I highly recommend the attached document as an easy introduction for conservatives, since in terms of most political issues, the CATO Institute – a Libertarian think tank founded in part by Charles Koch and two other arch-conservatives – is actually to the right of most folks, even in Texas, who call themselves “conservative.”  But if you’re not of a mindset to read the whole thing, let me take the opportunity to cut and paste two paragraphs that are especially apropos:

The second strand of research from Cato looks at criminal conviction rates by immigration status in the state of Texas.  Unlike every other state, Texas keeps track of the immigration statuses of convicted criminals and the crimes that they committed.  Texas is a wonderful state to study because it borders Mexico, has a large illegal immigrant population, is a politically conservative state governed by Republicans, had no jurisdictions that limited its cooperation with federal immigration enforcement in 2015, and it has a law and order reputation for strictly enforcing criminal laws.  If anything, Texas is more serious about enforcing laws against illegal immigrant criminals than other states.  But even here, illegal immigrant conviction rates are about half those of native-born Americans – without any controls for age, education, ethnicity, or any other characteristic.  The illegal immigrant conviction rates for homicide, larceny, and sex crimes are also below those of native-born Americans.  The criminal conviction rates for legal immigrants are the lowest of all.

The Texas research is consistent with the finding that crime along the Mexican border is much lower than in the rest of the country, homicide rates in Mexican states bordering the United States are not correlated with homicide rates here, El Paso’s border fence did not lower crime, Texas criminal conviction rates remain low (but not as low) when recidivism is factored in, and that police clearance rates are not lower in states with many illegal immigrants – which means that they don’t escape conviction by leaving the country after committing crimes.  

Meanwhile, another paragraph lower down than this cites serious research indicating that DUIs among undocumented immigrants is also lower than for other sectors, leading me to the conclusion that your anecdotal evidence, however valid it might be in your specific community, is not terribly relevant to making policy.  To quote one more paragraph from the CATO institute document: 

“None of what I wrote above will console a victim of illegal immigrant crime – and it shouldn’t.  To those victims and their loved ones, their pain is not diminished by knowing how unlikely it was to happen to them.  There will be criminals in any large group of people and there are some infuriating and  shocking anecdotes.” 

Unfortunately, I think, what you and many people don’t seem to understand is the follow-up to that sentence about “anecdotes” in the next sentence:  “The public seems to understand that the actions of a comparatively small number of illegal immigrants do not mean that they are more crime-prone than native-born Americans – which is what matters the most when debating public policy.” 

So … in terms of your dear Governor Abbot, I don’t like the guy.  I left Texas to study at Tulane in 1995, when Texas had its last relatively decent governor in Anne Richards.  As a couple of my old political pundit heroes – Molly Ivins and Ben Sergeant – used to regularly affirm, Texas politics has always been a circus of generally incompetent clowns.  But it’s gone downhill since I left, having mutated into an arena of wild-eyed self-described evangelical populist gladiators.  If I talk bad now as a NY Citizen about Abbot, trust me that if I still lived in Texas I would be working as hard as possbible to evict him from the State House.  As it is, I just throw the occasional snarky comment his way.

Anyway … just a couple points in closing … First, I did not post that comment on my friend’s page, but on my own, and he included my comment when sharing the post.  It’s absolutely fine with me that he did that, but I just want to assure you that I didn’t intentionally throw a bomb into your FB network.  Second, and more important, is that if you read the Dallas New’s editorial accompanying my post, it states very clearly that their problem with Abbot issuing his asinine edict is that the governor conflates “rejection of refugees,” which they find heartless, and “border control,” which the editors support.   I think, from your response to my post, that you are doing the same thing. 

In any event, I’ll continue to feel very comfortable criticizing Abbot and all his ilk who seek to impose a conservative tyranny on the entire nation.  Meanwhile, I continue to hope the reactionary populist surge that currently imperils our nation, and our world, will subside at some point in the not too distant future so we can dissipate the anger and hate, and return to some modicum of cultural and political coexistence … if not harmony.