The Weekly Screed (#781)

Building the better wetback trap
by David Benjamin

“… I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters…”
        — Donald Trump

MADISON, Wis. — Among the more tawdry spectacles in a campaign that sets a new standard for tawdriness, Donald Trump’s tasteless display — during a nativist rant last week — of parents whose kids were killed by undocumented immigrants either in crimes or accidents, was exceptional.

This tearjerk-palooza reprised the GOP Convention appearance of an inconsolable mother, Pat Smith, who accused Hillary Clinton of personally murdering her son in Libya.

Mrs. Smith, alas, has to take a spot far back in the queue of right-wing hysterics convinced that Hillary is a sort of Foggy Bottom Ripper, snuffing innocents serially from Arkansas to Chappaqua over the last 30 years.

Speaking of Hillary, she’s not without sin. She has visited, hugged and enlisted her own cadre of object-lesson victims, from Gabby Giffords to Sandy Hook moms to 9/ll first-responders. Not to mention Khizr and Ghazala Khan.

I wonder if it’s too much to ask both campaigns for a moratorium henceforth on the weaponization of heartbroken parents.

Just kidding.

The gist of Trump’s maudlin march of mourning moms was, as usual, the rapine tsunami of swarthy illegals, bearing bales of heroin, peyote and magic mushrooms across a cheesecloth Mexican border to befuddle our sons and ravish our girls. According to Trump, these interlopers number in the millions — 11, 30, 50, who knows? These lawless wetbacks — says Trump — have to be snatched up, bussed south and left somewhere beyond the Panama Canal without a paddle (or even a canoe!).

Only…

Conservative pundit David Brooks, citing the even more conservative Cato Institute, recently re-stated what’s been previously oft-stated: “… Research suggests that the recent surge in immigration has made America’s streets safer. That’s because foreign-born men are very unlikely to commit violent crime.

“According to one study, only 2 or 3 percent of Mexican-, Guatemalan- or Salvadoran-born men without a high school degree end up incarcerated, compared with 11 percent of their American-born counterparts.”

These actual facts suggest a radically different solution to the crisis Trump has been trumpeting for years. Fortunately, Donald Trump, a practical businessman, might consider this approach, because it’s both utilitarian and “outside the box.”

One word: Liberia!

One more word: Deportation.

You see where I’m going, Boss?

We know (see above) that non-Mexican Americans are out-raping, out-robbing and out-murdering illegals by an 11-to-2 margin. If you just go after Mexicans (Hondurans, Costa Ricans, etc.), you’re not going to take a real big bite out of crime. The numbers would look way better if we leave the Mexican crooks alone and focus instead on deporting all the other crooks — citizen-convicts, parole-violators, Bloods and Crips, outlaw bikers, white jaywalkers, Asian child molesters, French chefs, etc.

Deportation numbers would skyrocket, crime rates would crater and America would be safer than Switzerland on Easter Sunday. The only drawback? We’d have to scratch Mexico as our dumping-ground.

Which is where Liberia comes in. It’s really far away and hard to get back from. It’s currently underpopulated (thanks to the Ebola epidemic). In many ways, it resembles a penitentiary. Plus, it’s too small and weak to refuse us. And everybody there speaks English.

The latter fact derives from Liberia’s origin as a refuge for freed slaves from America — which means we’ve done this to these guys before. Liberia is used to getting huge shipments of unwanted black people from the U.S.A.

Out of fairness, of course, these undesirables won’t all be African-American (a term I really wish Trump would stop using because, from him, it sounds so… well, mealy). The white minority among America’s Liberian exiles — many of them proudly distinguished by their “88” tattoos and swastika scars — will boost, telegenically, the entertainment value of this social experiment. Picture a fly, its wings plucked away, dropped onto a teeming anthill. Picture Bruce Willis, in Die Hard 3, forced by Jeremy Irons to walk through Harlem wearing an “I Hate Niggers” sandwich-board.

Talk about reality-TV gold!

Liberia is ravaged by poverty, disease, ignorance, tribal bigotry and political dysfunction. It’s hard to imagine a more ideal milieu for the dregs of America’s gutters and gangs. Many of our deportees would treat Monrovia as a mere transit point between Statesboro and the guerrilla militias that infest the region, from Boko Haram to the Lord’s Resistance Army to the butchers in Sudan. With this influx of “freedom fighters,” outfits like LURD and Janjaweed wouldn’t need to arm and train quite as many ten-year-old killers.

Picture America’s worst degenerates making it possible for African kids to go back to gradeschool (and then, in Episode 2, burning down the school).

Unfortunately, this proposal poses some potential to bankrupt and destabilize not only Liberia but the whole region. Flooded by America’s baddest badasses, West Africa might well spiral down into the chaos and carnage that marked the post-colonial era. The Liberian Solution, also, would probably doom dozens of species — lions, elephants, mountain gorillas, rhinos, for sure — burned out, flushed out and wiped out in a continental crossfire.

But as the popular Mexican immigrant Freddy Prinze once said, “Hey, ees not my job, man.”

After all, Trump has proposed an immigration policy without costs or consequences. We want to do what we want to do, and let the chips forsake the losers. Trump’s America has no responsibility to help out any nation with any problem, even if America caused it. We’re the biggest, the strongest, the toughest and it’s time we acted that way. If Liberians or Mexicans, or Panama, don’t like us tipping the dregs of our mean streets and seething cellblocks into their fragile societies, well, as Donald Trump has famously and succinctly said: “They can go — ”

Well, you know.