Last Week Tonight opened with a disclaimer: the episode was filmed on Saturday 20 July, before Joe Biden announced his shock departure from the presidential race. Which didn’t lessen host John Oliver’s sharp message on the Republican national convention, or “the worst thing to happen to Milwaukee since Jeffrey Dahmer”.
The convention, held last week, saw “usual pageant of prominent politicians on stage and abject weirdos in the audience”, from attendees wearing bandages on their ears to match Trump’s to someone having “the most cursed bachelorette party in existence. It feels like she told her bridesmaids she wanted to see a bunch of dicks on stage and they tragically misunderstood the assignment,” Oliver joked. “Although to be fair, if anything screams ‘last night of freedom’, it is the Republican national convention.”
Though there was speculation that Donald Trump’s demeanor would be “muted” following his assassination attempt the weekend prior, “a message of unity is not something traditionally associated with that event or indeed this man,” said Oliver, “and unsurprisingly, the RNC was in no way toned down.”
That included the former US president’s “bonkers 90-minute-plus speech” on Thursday, in which he quickly ditched his “message of unity” for the usual playbook of crazy Nancy Pelosi, the “China virus” and discrediting the 2020 election. “But the big theme that he and so many other speakers kept returning to this week,” said Oliver, was what Trump called an “invasion” of undocumented immigrants.
“It’s no accident that Republicans were focusing so hard on immigration,” Oliver noted. “Recent polling shows it’s the second most important issue among Americans. But a big reason for that is the relentless, bad-faith fearmongering around the issue by the Republican party themselves, perhaps best summed up by the startling growth this year of the toxic phrase ‘migrant crime’.”
Oliver took aim at Trump for coining the term, which has been popularized and weaponized by Fox News.
Oliver was clear on the facts: “There is no migrant crime wave happening right now. In fact, there is no crime wave at all. Crime in general has been trending downward in recent years, including this one.” And he cited experts who found no evidence that there’s any link between a person’s immigration status and their involvement in crime. Texas, the one state that tracks crime tied to immigration status, found that the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate was in fact 45% below that of native-born Americans.
“And yet despite that, there have been a wave of conservatives claiming there is a wave of migrant crime. And that is almost definitely going to be continuing until November,” said Oliver. “And because there is, again, no data to back up claims of a migrant crime wave, they’ve had to resort to anecdotes or exaggeration.” An attempt by Republicans to track such nonexistent data led to a website listing fentanyl overdose deaths – “tragic, but you cannot connect them to migrant crime”, said Oliver, given that when fentanyl has been seized at the border, 90% of the time it was seized during legal crossings, and 91% of those seizures were from US citizens.
“I am not saying that there haven’t been individual migrants who have committed crimes,” Oliver noted. “Of course there have, because migrants are people, and some people do bad things, in the same way that some Abba fans and some people with Spongebob tattoos have committed crimes.”
“If you want to prevent crime and death, that’s a great idea, and there are absolutely ways to do that,” he added. “But when you draw a circle around a few members of a particular group, especially one identifiable by race or nationality, then generalize about what this means about all of them, no matter what you say, you’re not having a reasoned debate about crime or safety. You’re being racist.”
But such false rhetoric has been effective; over 70% of Republicans now believe the demonstrably false claim that there are migrants likely to commit crimes arriving in the US today.
“Migrant crime is not on the rise. That is a fact,” Oliver emphasized. “What is also a fact, though, is that people now feel as though it is. And that feeling has the potential to cause massive harm. And all of this is making the genuine issues around immigration,” such as the backlog in immigrations courts or providing cities help with sheltering and supporting people seeking asylum, “that much harder”.
What can be done? “Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we are currently four months out from an election,” said Oliver. “So just assume that the underlying, ‘what can we do?’ for most of our US stories from now until then is going to be: do not vote for Donald Trump.
“I’m not saying by any means that Biden is perfect, or even good, when it comes to immigration,” he concluded, “but he, or whoever winds up being the Democratic candidate – because who on Earth knows anything about that right now?! – is going to be incontrovertibly better than the alternative.”
