Outrage over the Killing of Laken Riley Is Completely Justified

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Monday, February 26, 2024

 

While following the political debate that has been prompted by the horrific killing of Laken Riley at the University of Georgia, I have seen one argument pop up more than any other: namely, that the resentment that is being directed toward both the Biden administration and the government of New York City is misplaced, because, statistically, illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than U.S. citizens. On Twitter, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz made this case as pithily as I have seen it made: “On the day that young woman was tragically killed,” Boaz wrote, “70 people were killed by American citizens.”

 

I must confess that I find this way of thinking entirely baffling. If the question at hand here were, “Do illegal immigrants commit crimes at a higher rate than U.S. citizens?” these numbers would be relevant. But that’s not the question, is it? The question that the critics are asking is, “What could have been done to prevent this murder?” And, clearly, the answer to that inquiry is going to be completely different when one is dealing with illegal immigrants — or any non-American visitors, for that matter — than when one is dealing with American citizens. By law, the United States government is obliged to monitor who is entering the country, and to turn away at the border anyone who is deemed likely to present a threat. For reasons that ought to be self-evident, it does not perform that service internally. Practically, philosophically, and politically, to compare the two directly is to compare chalk and cheese.

 

That the United States makes some effort to keep out non-citizen ne’er-do-wells ought to be obvious to anyone who has ever visited the country by airplane. In a couple of weeks, my British parents will visit me here in America and, before they do so, they will be obliged to apply for a waiver document called an “ESTA,” which requires them to declare whether they have ever committed any crimes, a declaration that is then checked using the Automated Targeting System (ATS) and the Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS); to submit their details via the airline to the Advance Passenger Information System, which cross-checks them against all available law-enforcement databases; and to submit to a short interview with a Border Patrol agent once they arrive. If my parents were to show up at the airport without these documents, it would not matter that, as septuagenarian tourists from rural England, they are on aggregate statistically less likely to commit a crime than are U.S. citizens. They would be turned away at the first hurdle. For them, the system is the system is the system. Most Americans — even most libertarian-leaning Americans — believe that running basic security checks of this type is a good idea.

 

Which brings us back to why people are angry with President Biden and the Democratic Party, and why an appeal to statistics does nothing to repel that anger. Unlike American citizens, for whom America is home, the man who killed Laken Riley should not have been in the United States in the first instance. It is true, of course, that, in a nation this big, some people will sneak through despite our best efforts to keep them out. But President Biden has not been making that effort. In fact, Biden has done precisely the opposite. Driven by a combination of fringe ideology and Trump-mirroring oppositional-defiant disorder, President Biden came into office three years ago and undid everything that had proved useful in keeping illegal immigration down. The result has been the biggest border crisis in a generation and an astonishing influx of people who do not qualify for admission. Americans know this.

 

Americans also know that, if the authorities in our largest cities were not so beholden to fringe identity politics, the man who allegedly killed Laken Riley would never have made it down to Georgia. Last year, Jose Antonio Ibarra was arrested in New York City on suspicion of endangering the life of a child, but, because New York City has combined an unwillingness to prosecute crime with a refusal to discourage illegal immigration, Ibarra was not charged, tried, convicted, and handed over to the authorities for deportation, but released back into the United States. This fact — that one of our governments had in its custody a man who it knew was bad news, and who it knew was here illegally — justly infuriates people. Appropriately, our Constitution limits what we can do about recidivists who happened to be born here: We can arrest, try, and convict them, certainly, but we cannot send them abroad to become someone else’s problem. Aliens, by contrast, have no freestanding right to enter the United States, and can thus be sent home if they misbehave. Jose Antonio Ibarra had no business being in America — and, once his presence had been discovered, he should not have been.

 

There is nothing bigoted, monomaniacal, or inappropriate about our wanting this distinction to be observed. As a matter of fact, I was wholly supportive of the U.S. government’s drawing it when I was not yet a citizen myself. Now that I am an American, I am entitled to all the protections that are accorded to the native-born. But I wasn’t always — and I shouldn’t have been always. Between being granted my first temporary visa in 2011 and raising my right hand at my citizenship ceremony in 2018, I was one of the most investigated people in the United States! During those seven years, I was repeatedly fingerprinted and photographed; I had to tell the federal government each time I moved; I went through four rounds of background checks; I was subjected to an in-depth interview at the U.S. Embassy in London; I had to provide a list of every country I’d traveled to, every place I’d lived, every job I’d had, and every organization I’d joined in the last five years; I had to vow that I was not a terrorist or human-trafficker or criminal and that I was not going to restrict anyone’s religious liberty; and, before I could obtain citizenship, I had to pass a civics test. Eventually, this led to my being moved from one category to the other, but at no point during the long transition did I consider the process unfair. Like the vast majority of Americans, I believe that American citizens have every right to determine who joins them in this country — and when one of the people who has joined them is charged with murdering an innocent college student, they have every right to be furious about it.