The Weekly Screed (#802)

Imaginary icebergs
by David Benjamin

“A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.”
                                                          — Joseph Stalin

MADISON, Wis. — There’s little evidence — even in the alt-right online sixth dimension — that ravening hordes of “illegal aliens” are swarming across the Rio Grande and killing Americans. The firmest numbers I could find on this claim were in the right-wing Washington Times about a year ago, which counted 124 homicides committed by undocumented immigrants between 2010 and 2015.

Sounds like a lot, until you dig down. In those six years, there were 95,876 other murders in the United States (give or take a few). The illegal-alien share in all that bloodshed comes out to .00129 percent, or one out of every 774 murders. Putting this into perspective, you’re eight times more likely be killed by a cop, 2,170 times more likely to be offed by your wife (if you’re a guy), and 5,271 times more likely to be strangled, shot or immolated by your husband.

Obviously, if you want to drum up hysterical fear of immigrants, statistics like this don’t really sell the goods. What you need is the perfect anecdote, a story so wrenching, touching and emotionally charged that even a skeptic is appalled into silence. If you’re talking about wetbacks on homicide sprees, your story begins and ends with Kathryn Steinle, killed in San Francisco on 1 July 2015 by a chronic border-jumper named Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez.

Steinle’s death is, at first blush, the xenophobe’s perfect storm. The victim was young, beautiful, bright (a Cal Tech grad), bursting with promise and — most important — white. The shooter was a career offender swarthy of complexion who’d been deported five times, only to sneak back into America, only to be arrested, convicted, imprisoned, and deported again to his native Mexico, only to sneak back across the border.

Add to this San Francisco, the most notorious (to the right wing) of all so-called “sanctuary cities.” Even worse, Wandering Juan was only on the street because a Frisco judge had just vacated a marijuana warrant that was too old — 20 years — to prosecute. Meanwhile, nobody in town had told the feds from ICE that Lopez-Sanchez was at large.

If various authorities in at least four states (California, Washington, Arizona and Texas) had been more effective in kicking Lopez-Sanchez back to Guanajuato and keeping him there, Ms. Steinle would be alive today. Before the shooting, Lopez-Sanchez had been jailed in San Bernardino County for entering the U.S. without a pass. Once released, he wasn’t deported. And, apparently, nobody in California knew that he was a fugitive from Texas, where he was on probation.

Lopez-Sanchez’ vocation of petty crime spanned five presidencies and two agencies, INS and ICE. All of the horses and all of the men under Reagan and Clinton, two Bushes and Barack Obama couldn’t keep this bad hombre out. The lawmen who kept catching Juan treated him more as a pest than a monster, probably because — until the shooting — he had no record of violence. His thing was narcotics. He fed his habit by selling heroin and marijuana, for which the best market in the world is America. This explains why Lopez-Sanchez wouldn’t stay put down yonder.

Kathryn Steinle’s death was a confluence of heartbreaking happenstances. Four days before the shooting, a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ranger, in the city for business, parked his vehicle near the Embarcadero, a popular tourist mecca on San Francisco Bay. Someone, possibly Wandering Juan, broke into the car and hit the junkie jackpot. Just lying there was a .40-caliber handgun.

Of course, the BLM doesn’t routinely issue guns — especially .40-cal cannons — to its employees. This was a “personal” weapon that its owner hadn’t very carefully concealed.

Lopez-Sanchez either stole the gun or acquired it from the thief. His rap sheet suggests that he had no plans to use it. However, before he got around to selling the gun, Wandering Juan, who was habitually stoned, took it into his head to stroll by the Bay and plunk a few sea lions. Considering his history and his high, it’s likely that if he’d aimed directly at Kathryn Steinle and fired, she would have gone unscathed. But he wasn’t trying to shoot her, or anyone. Ballistics experts confirmed that the bullet that pierced Steinle’s aorta had bounced off the pavement.

The killing, by a small-time felon waving a stolen handgun, was almost surely accidental. This likelihood is among the many ironies that render the story all the more poignant.

The biggest irony, of course, is that we’re all talking seriously now about erecting a $21 billion wall to protect the homeland — from the Beaner Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight. We’re looking at an extreme case of anecdote abuse.

I hasten to emphasize that a good anecdote, applied properly, is a neat expository device that helps make thorny issues accessible. Every day in the news, we see reports about complicated crises that people need to know, but they’re hard to explain. So, to draw readers in, the resourceful reporter will often lead by telling the story of a real person whose situation illustrates the dilemma.

Typically, the story then goes from the specific to the general. The reporter marshals testimony, documentation and measurable evidence to verify the scope and urgency of the issue that was capsulized in the opening anecdote. In professional journalism, the anecdote never stands alone. It rests atop a pyramid packed with proof, context and meaning.

An anecdote without a pyramid, however, is just bar talk. Or it can be magic. Sell the story as though it’s the tip of an iceberg, an example among thousands, and suddenly a singular outrage — like Kathryn Steinle's murder — becomes an epidemic that threatens to shred the very fabric of civilization. In reality, it threatens nothing, but never mind. By emphasizing certain details and omitting others,  the magician of hyperbole — without actually lying — can transform a single senseless crime into a holocaust and mount a statue of its luckless victim, bathed in floodlights, atop the Great Wall of Paranoia.

Kathryn Steinle’s loss is a heartbreaking story. But it has no pyramid and there is no iceberg. It’s not the story of alien invasion and liberal appeasement trumpeted by its hucksters. Certainly, some of the undocumented who sneak into America are drug mules and junkies. A few are rapists, even killers. But most are maids, tomato-pickers and gardeners — as well as the odd honor student, poet or chemical engineer. These arrivals to our teeming shore pose problems, but they aren’t big problems. After all, this is America. We’re better here at unfolding the couch and finding an extra blanket than anywhere else on earth.

The bigger problem today is a flood of scary stories too pat to be true, spun by blowhards too smug to believe. Rather than freaking over a trickle of Muslims and Mexicans, we should be focusing our fear on the propaganda that’s abroad in the land, and the totally “legal” people — millions of us — who swallow it.

The barbarians, Gracie, are not at the gate. They’re in the West Wing.