Washington Post (Plum Line)
By Paul Waldman
July 8, 2015
Is Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez the new Willie Horton?
There
are some people who would obviously like him to be. The story, which is
about an undocumented immigrant who allegedly murdered a young woman in
San Francisco named
Kathryn Steinle after having been released from jail, has gone
national. And it’s working its way into the presidential campaign. The
way the candidates deal with it (or not) will tell us a lot about the
state of immigration politics today.
It’s
important to understand that there’s no consensus even on the right
about how much attention to give to Lopez-Sanchez’s case. Most of the
Republican candidates are
treading carefully so far. While they oppose the “sanctuary city”
policies that meant that Lopez-Sanchez wasn’t turned over to immigration
authorities when he had been arrested for lesser crimes, they haven’t
yet tried to use this case as a bludgeon to attack
Democrats. (The unsurprising exception to this is Donald Trump;
meanwhile, for the record, many Democrats have said that a sanctuary
city policy should still have allowed someone like Lopez-Sanchez to be
turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.)
Yet
at the same time, conservative talk radio and Fox News are practically
vibrating with delight over this story. When I checked in to the
network’s web site this morning,
it was the subject not only of the main screaming headline, but five
other written stories and four videos, with more coming all the time.
What
does this one case tell us about crime in America and our immigration
policies? The real answer is not much, because one case is always just
one case. According to
the latest FBI crime statistics, around 38 Americans are murdered each
and every day; every one is a tragedy. We know that as a group,
immigrants are actually much less likely to commit crimes than
native-born Americans. And though it illustrates an extreme
negative consequence that can come from a sanctuary city policy, police
in cities with sanctuary policies often argue that they help fight
crime by allowing residents of immigrant communities to work with law
enforcement without the fear that they’ll be turned
over to immigration authorities.
Nevertheless,
we’re always looking for individual stories through which we can
understand larger issues, and those stories can be used for good or ill.
For instance, the
case of Ryan White, an Indiana teenager who contracted HIV in 1984,
taught the country that AIDS wasn’t just a disease of people who (at the
time) were on the fringes of society; after his death in 1990, Congress
passed a bill expanding funding for AIDS research
and treatment in his name. Then there are stories like Horton’s, which
was supposedly about criminal justice policies but was actually just a
way for George H.W. Bush to stir up racist fears among white voters in
the 1988 election.
If
Republican candidates are treading more carefully with regard to this
story, it isn’t just because the two cases are different — it’s because
there’s serious political
danger in trying to make Lopez-Sanchez a reason why people should vote
against Democrats. Don’t forget that Bush’s use of Willie Horton worked.
Laden with the theme of dangerous and hyper-sexualized black men
terrorizing white women while their emasculated
husbands looked on helplessly, it resonated with white voters and
didn’t produce any noticeable backlash, at least not enough to overcome
the benefit Bush got from repeating the story.
But
if someone like Scott Walker or Jeb Bush tried to make Lopez-Sanchez
the new Horton — a symbol of fear meant to get whites to pull the lever
for the GOP — he would
undermine all the party’s efforts to convince Hispanic voters that
whatever the party’s history on immigration reform, it isn’t blatantly
hostile to them. As Michael Gerson advised yesterday: “As the old
Southern strategy fades, it would be a terrible mistake
to replace it with a different form of fear and exclusion.”
So
we’re left with a situation where most of the candidates will criticize
sanctuary city policies and make a case for tougher border enforcement,
but they’ll be doing
it within a context created by their side’s media, the media the
primary voters they’re trying to win over are watching and listening to
every day. And the Lopez-Sanchez story is exactly the kind of tale that
the conservative media feast on: personal, vivid,
tragic, just waiting to have all the outrage and anger they can muster
poured into it. While the candidates say, “Yes, this is terrible,”
behind them will be the media figures Republican voters trust, screaming
at the top of their lungs that everyone should
be enraged.
In
that way, this particular story is a microcosm of the Republican
challenge on immigration. Caught between a base eagerly eating up the
red meat conservative media are
feeding them and a general electorate they can’t afford to alienate,
they still haven’t quite figured out how to chart a path that avoids
those dangers and gets them to the White House.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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