In the VP Debate, Pence Was Wrong about Crime

Oh boy. I watched the vice presidential debate clear through last night with a group of friends. It was . . . interesting. I’m curious whether unconscious sexism played a role in both candidates completely ignoring the moderator, Elaine Quijano. Would they have responded differently if it had been a man telling them to stop speaking so they could move on to the next question, chiding them for interrupting each other, and asking them to please stay on topic? It got to the point where I really wanted her to raise her voice and actually chew them out. Kaine especially should have stopped interrupting, though Pence did eventually join heartily in his habit.

But that’s about style. What about content? That’s where things get really interesting. Kaine focused on promoting Clinton, reinforcing her positions, and articulating her vision, and (I thought) effectively doing all three. In other words, he did what a vice presidential candidate is supposed to do. Pence, on the other hand, spent much of his time either “explaining” ridiculous things Trump has said or (frequently) arguing Trump never said what he actually said. This exchange, for instance, was amazing:

PENCE: No, it’s really not. Donald Trump and I would never support legislation that punished women who made the heartbreaking choice to end a pregnancy.

KAINE: Then why did Donald Trump say that?

PENCE: We just never would.

KAINE: Why did he say that?

PENCE: Well, look, it’s — look, he’s not a polished politician like you and Hillary Clinton. And so … you know, things don’t always come out exactly the way he means them.

This is amazing, because it effectively gives Trump carte blanche authority to say whatever he wants to say, and for Pence to then come do clean up behind him, claiming that what he said doesn’t matter, because he’s “not a polished politician” and “things don’t always come out exactly the way he means them.” I’m sorry, but this isn’t about being a “polished politician” or not. This is about basic communication skills. Here, again, is what Trump said about punishing women who obtained abortions:

MATTHEWS: Do you believe in punishment for abortion, yes or no as a principle?

TRUMP: The answer is that there has to be some form of punishment.

MATTHEWS: For the woman.

TRUMP: Yeah, there has to be some form.

MATTHEWS: Ten cents? Ten years? What?

TRUMP: I don’t know. That I don’t know. That I don’t know.

But then Trump isn’t a polished politician, so we shouldn’t take what he says at face value—apparently—or assume that he means what he says. And that’s a problem.

Lately, Donald Trump has continued to promise that he will build a wall on our border with Mexico and deport any immigrant who has committed a violent crime. He’s been less vocal on what he will do with the millions and millions of undocumented immigrants not convicted of a violent crime. When pressed, he says no undocumented immigrant will be allowed to become documented without first leaving the country and then applying to come back. Given the time this would take, this would require these immigrants to give up their homes and jobs, to take their kids out of school and spend thousands of dollars to leave the country and find somewhere else to live until the completion of the (likely lengthy) paperwork process.

During the vice presidential debate, Quijano did something I’ve been wanting reporters and others to do for some time—she pressed Pence on what would happen to the millions of undocumented immigrants not convicted of a violent crime.

QUIJANO: So, Governor, how would these millions of undocumented immigrants leave? Would they be forcibly removed?

PENCE: Well, I think Donald Trump laid out a series of priorities that doesn’t ends with border security. It begins with border security. And after we secure the border, not only build a wall, but beneath the ground and in the air, we do internal enforcement.

But he said the focus has to be on criminal aliens. We just — we just had a conversation about law enforcement. We just had a conversation about the — the violence that’s besetting our cities. The reality is that there’s heartbreak and tragedy that has struck American families because people that came into this country illegally are now involved in criminal enterprise and activity. And we don’t have the resources or the will to deport them systemically.

Donald Trump has said we’re going to move those people out, people who’ve overstayed their visas. We’re going to enforce the law of this country. We’re going to strengthen Immigrations and Customs Enforcements with more resources and more personnel to be able to do that. And then Donald Trump has made it clear, once we’ve done all of those things, that we’re going to reform the immigration system that we have …

That’s the order that you should do it. Border security, removing criminal aliens, upholding with law, and then — but then, Senator, I’ll work you when you go back to the Senate, I promise you, we’ll work you to reform the immigration system.

Pence started his answer with a sentence so incomprehensible that the entire room of people I was watching with burst out laughing when he said it. But did he ultimately answer Quijano’s question? Not really. Pence said Trump wants to focus first on securing the border and second on deporting criminal aliens. He said that next, Trump wants to “enforce the law of this country.” This presumably includes deporting the millions of immigrants Quijano was asking about, but Pence didn’t come right out and say that, because that would be unpleasant. Pence said that fourth and finally, Trump is going to work to reform the immigration system, by which I assume he means creating new rules for who is allowed to enter, and how.

Let’s talk about criminal aliens. Check out the Wall Street Journal’s summary of the research on undocumented immigrants and violent crime:

They might start by pointing out that numerous studies going back more than a century have shown that immigrants—regardless of nationality or legal status—are less likely than the native population to commit violent crimes or to be incarcerated. A new report from the Immigration Policy Center notes that while the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. more than tripled between 1990 and 2013 to more than 11.2 million, “FBI data indicate that the violent crime rate declined 48%—which included falling rates of aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder. Likewise, the property crime rate fell 41%, including declining rates of motor vehicle theft, larceny/robbery, and burglary.”

A separate IPC paper from 2007 explains that this is not a function of well-behaved high-skilled immigrants from India and China offsetting misdeeds of Latin American newcomers. The data show that “for every ethnic group without exception, incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants,” according to the report. “This holds true especially for the Mexicans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans who make up the bulk of the undocumented population.”

It also holds true in states with large populations of illegal residents. A 2008 report by the Public Policy Institute of California found that immigrants are underrepresented in the prison system. “The incarceration rate for foreign-born adults is 297 per 100,000 in the population, compared [with] 813 per 100,000 for U.S.-born adults,” the study concludes. “The foreign-born, who make up roughly 35% of California’s adult population, constitute 17% of the state prison population.”

In other words, all of this talk about criminal aliens is exactly backwards. In fact, undocumented immigrants are actually far less likely than native-born Americans to commit a crime. In fact, some researchers have suggested that increased immigration is a factor in the reduction of crime the U.S. has seen over the past two decades. In other words, it appears that immigration (documented or not) decreases crime.

This focus on criminal aliens makes sense only if it is part of a larger attempt to make the average American associate immigration with crime in order to ensure that they will support mass deportations of completely benign undocumented immigrants, men, women, and children. And that is heinous to the extreme.

And then there’s this, too:

PENCE: But also, Donald Trump and I are committed to suspending the Syrian refugee program and programs and immigration from areas of the world that have been compromised by terrorism.

Shutting the door to refugees is a horrible idea. We’ve done it before and it went terribly. It’s the reason Anne Frank is dead. And here Pence is reinforcing it. I should note, of course, that this is perhaps not surprising—last fall Pence unilaterally barred Syrian refugee settlement in Indiana, even as several families were en route.

Pence’s comments on race were equally tone deaf. Speaking of Charlotte, Pence said:

PENCE: Senator, when African-American police officers involved in a police action shooting involving an African-American, why would Hillary Clinton accuse that African-American police officer of implicit bias?

Are we really doing this? Really? It seems Pence needs a history lesson. He must not have heard about the doll studies presented as evidence in arguments against school segregation in what became Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Check it out:

In the 1940s, psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark designed and conducted a series of experiments known colloquially as “the doll tests” to study the psychological effects of segregation on African-American children.

Drs. Clark used four dolls, identical except for color, to test children’s racial perceptions. Their subjects, children between the ages of three to seven, were asked to identify both the race of the dolls and which color doll they prefer. A majority of the children preferred the white doll and assigned positive characteristics to it. The Clarks concluded that “prejudice, discrimination, and segregation” created a feeling of inferiority among African-American children and damaged their self-esteem.

In other words, systemic discrimination and profiling doesn’t just affect the perceptions held by white people. It also affects the perceptions held by black people. It doesn’t just affect children, either, and the effect isn’t something that ended in the 1950s. You’ve probably heard of studies that show pictures of individuals, some holding guns and some holding other items like cell phones, and ask subjects to hit one button to shoot and another to stand down. These studies have found that:

Note that last line. Even African American respondents (the last of the four studies they analyzed compared a group of white students with a group of black students) hit the shoot button more frequently when shown an unarmed black man than when shown an unarmed white man, and hesitated longer before hitting shoot when the image was of a white man than when it was of a black man. In other words, African Americans are frequently exposed to and emersed in similar cultural stereotypes to those most whites adopt, and that does not leave them unaffected.

I’m really surprised Pence went into the debate not knowing this. Hearing Hillary’s comments and thinking “that’s really weird that she said that black cop suffered from implicit bias when he shot that unarmed black man” should be followed up by taking the time to find out why she said what she did. Simply deciding that it must not be true because it doesn’t make sense to you, without doing any research or legwork, and then stating that on national TV, is the kind of irresponsible laziness that ought to disqualify one from running for president in the first place.

Let’s stop treating Pence like he’s your average Republican. He may look it compared to Trump, but he wasn’t seen that way until he had Trump as a foil. Pence passed a law requiring women to bury or cremate their miscarriages. Can we just remember that for a moment? His bill was so outrageous that he had women across Indiana calling his office to determine whether their period could possibly be an early miscarriage, and thus in need of burial or cremation. If elected, he will also be the most theocratic politician to occupy the White House (as president or vice president) since I don’t know when. Maybe ever. And unfortunately, even if Pence isn’t elected, it’s very unlikely he’ll go away any time soon.