Seventeen-year-old Jabari Malloy was shot dead near his Washington, D.C., apartment in late February, but you probably haven’t heard a word about the crime. You likely haven’t heard about the death of 19-year-old Keyonce Gladney, shot dead in a Chicago park in late February, apparently collateral damage from the targeted shooting of a young man.
But it is quite likely that you’ve heard about the death of Laken Hope Riley, 22, who was murdered several days ago while jogging on a trail on the University of Georgia’s campus. American culture has never judged every murder victim equally, even if each is an equally wholesome citizen. Black and brown victims are rarely afforded the compassion and communal grief shown to attractive white women.
Riley was a young white nursing student at nearby Augusta University and was apparently killed for no reason — just, police say, a “crime of opportunity.” That’s enough to cause chills on UGA’s campus, especially among other young women who frequent the wooded jogging trails.
But there is an additional reason why Riley’s murder has become a cause celebre in the right-wing mediascape: The man charged with her murder, Jose Ibarra, is an illegal immigrant from Venezuela. It seems some suspects are also more important than others — at least as a cautionary tale. To the viciously xenophobic right, Ibarra demonstrates the foolishness of current border policies. According to authorities, Ibarra was arrested by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in September 2022 but released pending appeal of his immigration case.
Right-wing radio host and blogger Erick Erickson declared, “It cannot be ignored that she died at the hands of an illegal alien who crossed into the country in 2022 as President Biden refused to secure the borders.”
Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, chimed in on Fox News, “It’s just outrageous. People are so frustrated. And this is something that we’ve been talking about for years now, about the porous southern border.”
I am so sorry for Riley’s family, as I’m sorry for the families of Gladney and Malloy. As the mother of a 15-year-old, I spend far too much time obsessing over the dangers she faces — sexual assault, car accidents, gun violence — especially as the time nears when I cannot watch over her nearly as much. But threats specifically from undocumented immigrants never enter my mind. That’s because they commit far fewer crimes than people born in this country.
As The Washington Post points out, “There is strong evidence that all immigrants — in the United States legally or otherwise — are more law-abiding than native-born American citizens.” In their 2023 book, “Immigration and Crime: Taking Stock,” criminologists Graham Ousey and Charis Kubrin found that communities with more immigration tend to have less crime.
Moreover, violent crime is dropping in the United States, happily. After surging during the pandemic, when all sorts of antisocial behaviors increased, violent crime has declined since 2020, which coincides with the presidency of President Joe Biden. The campaign of his rival, Donald Trump, of course claims otherwise. On social media, Trump’s campaign has posted the following tagline on an ad: “You’re not safe in Joe Biden’s America.”
There is a long tradition in American politics of Republicans campaigning on restoring “law and order,” and there is an even longer tradition of conservative politicians pandering to the xenophobic tendencies of a sizable population of American voters. During the 19th century, Irish immigrants were caricatured in political cartoons as lazy, drunken and violent. Similarly, Chinese laborers faced virulent racism, dismissed as dirty, disease-carrying dangers to society. There is in many of us, apparently, a primal need to fear and ostracize the “other.”
When an illegal immigrant from Mexico was charged with the death of 20-year-old University of Iowa student Mollie Tibbetts in 2018, her father wrote an impassioned plea for politicians and their allies to stop using her death as a political pawn. “Do not appropriate Mollie’s soul in advancing views she believed were profoundly racist. The act grievously extends the crime that stole Mollie from our family,” Rob Tibbetts wrote in The Des Moines Register.
Unfortunately, that racism lives on.
Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.
