With billions of dollars of his own money behind him, Donald Trump believes he can be as politically incorrect, as bold, as inelegant and as in-your-face as he wants to be.
In the end, his remarks won’t buy him a presidential nomination, sensitivity awards or sympathy, but is it possible his offensive remarks could have a ring of truth in them?
Way back, more than half a month ago when Trump announced his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, he blustered in a nonscripted speech about Mexican illegal immigrants “bringing drugs,” “bringing crime” and being “rapists.”
Even though illegal immigration is still, well, illegal, polished, politically correct candidates don’t talk like that but speak in generalities about the border, about immigration reform and about Obama administration immigration overreach.
They don’t want to get their hands dirty by painting the voters they’d one day love to have with the broad brush of the criminal misdoings of some of the illegals.
But just how much misdoing is perpetrated by illegals?
According to the United States Sentencing Commission data obtained by Brietbart News, illegal immigrants account for 3.5 percent of the U.S. population but represented 36.7 percent of federal sentences following criminal convictions in fiscal year 2014.
If the percentage seems unbelievable, it does include immigration violations. But even without immigration violations, illegal immigrants account for 13.2 percent of all offenders following federal criminal convictions in 2014. That’s more than three times the percentage of their numbers in the country.
Of all federal cases that involved convictions, illegal immigrants represented 74.1 percent of drug possession sentences, 20 percent of kidnapping/hostage taking sentences, 16.8 percent of drug trafficking sentences, 12.3 percent of money laundering sentences and 12 percent of murder sentences.
The recent murder of a woman in San Francisco by an illegal immigrant who had been deported without success five times has heightened concern about the issue so much that even soft-on-immigration liberals like Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., criticized the system that allowed the alleged murderer to be free to commit such a crime.
Officials in San Francisco, which considers itself to be a “sanctuary” city for illegal immigrants, disregarded a request from immigration authorities to keep Francisco Sanchez, a repeat drug offender, locked up. Sanchez, in a jailhouse interview with a television station, as much as said he came to the city because of its sanctuary status. The gun he used even was found to belong to a federal agent, though it was uncertain how he got it.
Despite the incident and despite the glaring U.S. Sentencing Commission numbers, some politicians still don’t want to see the problem.
“Our policy,” said California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney who is running for U.S. Senate, “should not be informed by our collective outrage about one man’s conduct.”
Her statement brings to mind the statement attributed most often to 17th-century English Presbyterian minister and writer Matthew Henry: “There are none so blind as those that will not see.”
Trump’s presidential primary opponents are right to criticize the bombast of the billionaire, but those who don’t get the intent of his message may be doomed to second-tier status in the primaries or, eventually, to a second-place finish in the presidential race. And in presidential politics, second-place is first loser.
Most Americans are less afraid of the jobs illegal immigrants take than the lack of inherent fairness in their being able to sneak across the border to win those jobs, benefits, driver’s licenses and permanent homes. Since it is not physically possible to round them all up, send them back to their countries of origin and have them apply for legal citizenship, something needs to be worked out.
The Republican who comes up with and can articulate such a solution, which would include a secure Southern border and citizenship for those staying but not until fines are paid and thresholds are met, will appeal to Hispanic voters who will be key to future GOP victories but also to Joe Sixpack Americans who have willing, open hearts but also believe in sense of right and wrong.
Which all, in the final analysis, trumps Trump but good.