The Myth of the Dangerous Blue City
Expanding the budget by inventing enemies.
Crime is always the excuse. Criminal migrants are invading our southern border! Cue foreign gulags and homegrown concentration camps. U.S. cities are overrun with gangs and terrorists! Send the National Guard. Send the Marines. Take over the local police. It’s the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook. Invent an emergency. Raise an army.
There was no invasion at the southern border. It was made up. Most immigrants aren’t criminals. U.S. citizens are much more likely to commit crimes. In her book, Against the Wall, and across her newsletters here on Substack and over at Ghost,
, a former senior Border Patrol agent, routinely points out how much more likely Border Patrol, CBP and ICE agents are to commit crimes than the migrants and immigrants they terrorize.Even using ICE’s own data, we can see that the majority of immigrants in detention are nonviolent and do not have criminal convictions on their records. In fact, what may be the largest population of immigrants with no criminal convictions in U.S. history is currently in custody. There’s no invasion of dangerous immigrants. It’s a myth used to scare half the population into believing totalitarian control is the only way to deal with an imaginary problem. The other big myth? Dangerous Democrat-led cities.
Washington D.C. Los Angeles. Chicago. New York. Epicenters of lawlessness and havens for Tren de Aragua and the Mexican cartel, if you’re to believe this administration. Except the numbers don’t bear these claims out. In a vigorous defense of Chicago,
shows that crime in Chicago is down and debunks the notion that blue cities are crime hubs. In reality, the murder rate in red states (and a few purple) is 40% higher!Does that mean the Marines and the National Guard should be deployed in red suburbs, rural parts, cities and states? No, that’s an abuse of power any which way you slice it. Plus, sending the U.S. Military does nothing to address the underlying structural problems that produce crime.
If inventing an emergency is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook, demonizing opponents is the second oldest. Actually, they’re one and the same. You can’t invent an emergency without a villain. If you can convince one segment of the population that another segment of the population is evil, they’ll let you do anything to them. They’ll let you build concentration camps. They’ll let you torture innocents. They’ll let you perform ethnic cleansing. Because the means justify the ends when you’re dealing with the enemy.
But what happens when there are no enemies left? What happens when all “illegal” immigrants have been expelled? When the criminal element of blue cities has been rooted out and destroyed? When there is no more blue left? No opposition? Would this administration declare a categorial victory? Would the remainder of the United States live in peace and harmony?
Of course not. Peace is bad for business.
Since President Eisenhower’s warning of the military industrial complex in 1961, the military budget ballooned from $40 billion to $900 billion—more than double the inflation rate—and is expected to pass the trillion-dollar mark later this year. As gargantuan as that budget is, it fails to paint a complete picture of our war funding, as federal enforcement agencies and local law enforcement have effectively been subsumed under the military industrial complex.
refers to the immigration arm of this phenomenon as the border industrial complex. The most notable example is ICE’s $75 billion windfall in July and its spiderwebbing 287(g) program. The military industrial complex is an insatiable behemoth.To justify the largest military and police budgets in the world, we must have an enemy. Without an enemy, there is no war. Without war, there is no military industrial complex. But we’ll never run out of enemies. We’ll simply invent more. There’s too much money at stake. You may not be the enemy right now, but give it a while. What you do, or allow to be done, to your perceived enemy is what you accept as your eventual fate.