Saturday, June 23, 2018

A Response, along with a Movie Recommendation

A couple readers emailed me about yesterday's post, asking me whether I want to enforce the law. The implicit suggestion is that President Trump's immigration policy is simply law enforcement.

Of course, I believe in law enforcement, but enforcement has to be proportionate. Double parking is illegal, but we don't execute people for double parking. We give them a ticket.

The Trump administration's response to illegal immigration is vastly disproportionate. He paints a picture of the nation being ruined by illegal immigration, but that is just not true. He is doing great harm to many people to solve a problem that is largely fictional.

I don't pretend to fully understand Mr Trump's goals and actions, but his supporters seem motivated by a combination of understandable economic and cultural anxiety, misdirected blame, and in some cases latent prejudice. Mr Trump seems to play to that combination for purposes of self-aggrandizement.

Yesterday, I saw the movie Burden, a story about a man raised within the KKK community and his personal struggle to escape from it. I highly recommend the film. Along with the book Hillbilly Elegy, it does a good job of explaining the culture and perspectives of less educated white Americans, who are Mr Trump's base.