Put Y'all Back in Chains, page 9
Within the black community, there are significant collateral effects of this job displacement. Family formation, intergenerational wealth creation, incarceration, addiction, and social service use by blacks are all affected. Poor or unemployed black men are far less likely to be seen as attractive lifelong mates. Thus, the already hemorrhaging marriage rate for blacks continues its decline. According to the US Census, more than half of black men in America are unmarried,87 and marriage has a strong correlation with social stability and wealth creation.
These males aren’t chaste. Today, a staggering 70 percent of black children are born to unwed mothers.88 Single-parent households have the biggest challenge in getting their children to graduate and avoid addiction and incarceration. Single-parent black families have it hardest.
There is a solution that the Biden Administration could adopt that would be good for the economy and for blacks: he could separate citizenship from work visas. Instead of attempting a “cut the baby in half” immigration reform, granting citizenship to millions of people who are illegally in the country in order to halt deportations, America should separate those who might be welcomed as citizens from those only interested in temporary employment opportunities. In both cases, the decision ought to be based on what is in Americans’ interests.
For purposes of citizenship, the U.S. should eliminate or dramatically reduce the immigration lottery as well as adopt new limits on so-called chain migration (an immigration advantage based on being related to someone who has already legally immigrated). The government should prioritize economically self-sufficient and highly educated applicants instead. For work visas, the U.S. should prioritize those with skills that are scarce, instead of encouraging today’s shadow labor market of illegals. Employers should be required to compensate the local and state communities for any costs associated with non-citizen use of social programs, thereby ending the social-services magnet.
Visas should be both harder and easier to get. For areas where labor is truly needed, the process should work much faster, making an illegal journey to America less attractive. If you can quickly get a visa, you’re less likely to cross the border illegally. On the other hand, these visas would be hard to obtain unless the type of work is in a field where there are needs in the US job market. Also, the duration of a work visa should be much shorter, regularizing the ability of migrants to return to their home country after the project ends, and then return when new opportunities arise.
America has every right—and responsibility—to determine who may become an American citizen and who may visit, for how long, under which terms. Knowing who is crossing the borders after 9/11 and the COVID-19 pandemic has taken on greater urgency. President Biden’s policies reward those who enter the country illegally, thereby undermining the nation’s sovereignty and hurting Americans’ economic interests, especially those of black Americans. President Biden’s anti-border-security policies must end; it’s obvious that a country must control its own borders.
Besides the financial impact, the Biden immigration agenda provides another reason for blacks to be concerned. It represents a stark difference between the substance of policy agendas for blacks and for Hispanics. For Hispanics, Biden has absorbed the cost of abandoning the border wall by leaving it uncompleted, pushed for comprehensive immigration reform, pledged to get enacted a multi-billion dollar education training program, promised to legalize Dreamers, and agreed to review all migrants deported by Trump by the TPS (Temporary Protected Status) program. Whether Hispanic voters in America find this attractive remains to be seen. But the difference in substance between the programme offered to Latinos and blacks is significant.
In 2020, candidate Biden promised black Americans a study on reparations, a federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery, and inner-city law enforcement training reforms. Thin gruel in contrast to his plan for Hispanics—so far, he has undertaken robust executive action to limit the likelihood of deportations and even tried a legislative push for immigration reform on their behalf.
To date, the President hasn’t put any muscle behind the so-called reparations commission, H.R. 40 (named for “40 acres and a mule”), and he hasn’t even endorsed the bill. While reparations wouldn’t actually help blacks and would definitely harm race relations, it is telling that, once in office, Biden has walked away from the issue.
The federal holiday of Juneteenth did end up being enacted, becoming the first new federal holiday since President Reagan signed the Martin Luther King, Jr. federal holiday into law. At the signing ceremony for Juneteenth, Vice President Harris said, “We have come far, and we have far to go. But today is a day of celebration.”89 But is a new holiday for federal employees to get paid without working worth celebrating? Moreover, one might wonder why December 6 wasn’t chosen. That’s the date that the Thirteenth Amendment, which banned slavery, was ratified.
Finally, even the more substantive police reform effort pushed by Republican Senator Tim Scott from South Carolina (mostly built on the false Black Lives Matter narrative) has gone nowhere. In fact, it is all but dead. After working months on the issue, in the fall of 2021, he announced that the negotiations had collapsed, saying that the White House and Senate Democrats insisted on the “defund the police” agenda, as well as on unduly restricting traditional law enforcement practices.90 These issues served their purpose for Democrats—they created the impression of concern for blacks without actually doing anything.
Immigration–illegal and legal–has affected blacks for generations. Even as far back as the nineteenth century, abolitionist Frederick Douglass complained about what he called the “elbowed out of employment” effects that immigrant labor had on black Americans.91 This phenomenon is even truer today.
To sum up, Biden’s decision to abandon border controls costs blacks across the board. Blacks disproportionately bear the burden for government services provided to illegal immigrants with whom they are forced to compete for access. Except for skilled laborers, unfettered illegal immigration suppresses wage growth and makes job opportunities scarcer. Crime in black communities is elevated. And many of the safety net programs that exist for Americans are unable to fulfill their promises to black America. President Biden has done very little for the black community and has placed far more of his political muscle behind immigration policy (largely as a misguided means of appealing to Hispanic American voters) even though it would harm blacks born in the U.S. His immigration policies are anti-black and anti-American.
Chapter Four
The Killing FieldsBiden’s Policies Unleash a Crime Wave in America
Blacks Harmed the Most
Although Black Americans want and need robust law enforcement in their communities, President Biden pushes progressive schemes instead. As a result, America is experiencing a crime wave not seen since the late 1960s.
Even though the American people have paid trillions of dollars of income to alleviate poverty, homelessness, and poor education as part of the Great Society, the result has been an abject failure. Yet President Biden acts as if those approaches had never been tried before, and seeks to double down on them. He refuses to encourage the creation of stronger families, a strong work ethic, and policies that promote personal responsibility. America—and blacks in particular—suffer as a result.
Improving neighborhood safety and protecting businesses will expand the economy and give all Americans a chance. This approach is especially helpful in improving the quality of life for blacks in urban communities. Sadly, this Administration is more committed to the visions and policies of woke utopians, and he has made the country less safe.
Since the 1960s, progressives have pushed policies that green-light crime by attempting to separate accountability from bad behavior. Today, they’ve largely gotten their way and a crime wave which affects every area of the country has followed.
The Chamber of Commerce reported in September 2022 that thefts for small retailers had been so extensive that nearly half of those stores had raised prices.1 According to Neil Bradley, Executive Vice President and Chief Policy Office at the Chamber of Commerce, retail theft has increased 50 percent over the last five years, with the greatest occurring since 2021.2 Retail theft puts employees at risk and harms already stretched household budgets.
Even the “carjacking” crisis is back. In a piece called “Carjacking: a new name for an old crime,” the New York Times noted an explosion in car thefts in the late 1980s, the overwhelming majority occurring in urban areas, with an new twist: instead of stealing them while parked, the vehicles were being stolen while the driver was in the vehicle.3 Then in 1991 the term “carjacking” was coined by the Detroit News.4
Carjackings became such a serious problem that Congress intervened to ban it in 1992. According to an analysis of the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, from 1993 to 2002 the rate of carjackings dropped from 49,000 to 38,000 carjackings annually Even Detroit—the carjacking capitol—saw a dramatic drop in this type of crime.5 This modern version of highway robbery had all but been stopped in its tracks.
That trend is over. Carjacking has returned as a serious problem, with6 532 carjackings in 2021 in Detroit alone,7 and increasing more than 25 percent for 2022 in Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington, DC., and Baltimore.8
Homicides are ballooning as well. In October of 2021, the Center for Disease Control announced that the US experienced its largest one-year increase in homicides in “modern history.”9
New York’s Success Story Repudiated
Consider this: After New York City reached a high of 2,600 murders in 1990, the number of murders began to fall dramatically after Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor and continued to decrease to less than 600 a year by 2018.10 Elected as the 107th Mayor of New York City, from 1994 to 2001, Guiliani tamed one of the world’s most violent cities in two terms. While he is credited with implementing the so-called “broken windows” doctrine of policing11 as a means of solving the crime problem of New York, increasingly, a growing consensus has developed that a more orthodox explanation makes the most sense for the successful crime reduction in the city: arresting felons.12
During Giuliani’s terms, the size of the city’s police force grew dramatically, by more than 35 percent,13 and the population of New Yorkers sitting behind bars ballooned by 25 percent.14 In other words, having many more officers to investigate violent crimes and actually arresting those when they are caught lowers homicides, burglaries, vehicle thefts, assaults, and robberies.15 Every type of crime in the city followed the same pattern. Blacks were the biggest beneficiary of this crime reduction, but the good times have ended, and the numbers show it.
In 1999, the NYPD had 40,000 officers in its department.16 Today, the number is fewer than 36,000.17 Arrests are on a 10-year decline, not even reaching 70,000 in 2021.18 Today, in almost every category, crime has escalated in New York City. In 2021, the murder rate reached a ten-year high.19 According to the New York Post, all major crimes topped 100,000 incidents for the first time since 2016.20
Blacks—especially in the urban centers of America—are suffering the most.
Early in 2022, Bloomberg ran a story with this sad headline: “Homicide Is Pandemic’s Biggest Killer of Young Black Men.”21 According to the piece, the homicide rate for young black men has risen 66 percent since 2019—an increase that is nearly ten times as high as the homicide rate for the rest of Americans over that same time period.22 Per 100,000 Americans, the homicide rate for blacks rose from 22.9 percent in 2019 to 30.7 percent in 2020. Worse, blacks—only 13.5 percent of the US population—made up 57 percent of the deaths by homicide during that time frame.23 (Sadly, the homicide rates for all other Americans increased also, from 3.2 per 100,000 to 3.8.24)
Among the causes are so-called criminal justice “reforms”: bail reform, sentencing reform, and defunding the police.
Bail Reform Scheme
Supporters of “bail reform” argue that having to post bail prior to trial disproportionately harms the working poor and minorities because they can’t afford to pay. They claim that bail isn’t even needed. They couldn’t be more wrong. After an arrest or arraignment, a court today has two choices: detain the defendant or release him while awaiting trial. If the defendant is released while awaiting trial, courts must determine whether a sum of money should be paid as a surety bond to guarantee that the accused will show up for trial.
Bail isn’t some mechanism to punish the accused. In fact, it is a way to “split the baby”—it allows the presumption of innocence with no pretrial detention while awaiting trial. Without bail, local communities are forced to allow both the dangerous and the innocent to go free prior to trial or to detain both the innocent and the dangerous.
Bail as a concept has existed since well before the founding of the United States. There are reports of its use in ancient Rome.25 There are examples of bail, like that used in the U.S., at least 1,000 years ago.26 Following the Norman Conquest in 1066, England developed a system of payments to guarantee a way for disputes to be settled peacefully,27 and the American Colonies mostly followed England’s bail rules: when a defendant was arrested, he had to have someone step forward to guarantee that the defendant would appear for trial.28 Mostly that involved a promise or pledge by a third party to be responsible, and other times it involved a cash payment.29
One of the earliest criminal justice laws passed in the US, the Judiciary Act of 1789, included bail for all crimes that didn’t have the possibility of the death penalty.30 Bail is also referenced in the Bill of Rights; the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution states, “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, not cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”31
Chief Judge William Cranch of the U.S. Circuit Court of the District of Columbia oversaw one of the first instances of a cash bond, in a case involving would-be presidential assassin Richard Lawrence.32 In 1835, Lawrence, a house painter, attempted to shoot President Andrew Jackson not once, but twice, though remarkably, both guns he tried misfired.33 Francis Scott Key, then the district attorney trying the case, didn’t want Lawrence released prior to trial, and ultimately, Judge Cranch assessed bail at $1,500 (the equivalent of $50,000 today).34
In the twentieth century, much of the focus on bail involved seeing to it that defendants showed up for their trials and determining how much threat the individuals arrested posed to the local community. Two statutes were passed to address this: the D.C. Court Reform and Criminal Procedure Act of 1970, and the Federal Bail Reform Act of 1984.35 Together, the bills set protocols for determining who should be released and who should be detained. The bills specifically authorized cases of “intentional detention” involving defendants who were a flight risk and authorized the use of a varying scale of cash bonds.
Today, President Biden has joined with the Left to completely undercut these provisions, and in the process, he has put American communities at risk.
Consider what’s happened in New York City. New York State, one of the first to try out this dangerous experiment, has already seen the consequences. In the fall of 2022, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services finally released the data on criminal activity since bail reform began, and the results are not surprising. Bail reform led to a huge rise in crime.36
New York City announced in its New York Police Department (NYPD) Citywide Crime Statistics Annual report that the city experienced an overall crime spike of more than 30 percent.37 The key takeaway is that recidivism—where criminals who are arrested and released then reoffend—increased substantially.38 According to Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, rearrests before trial alone increased nearly 7 percent for the twelve months before August 2022.39
Cash bail isn’t just constitutional; it is essential. America will either warehouse every accused defendant prior to trial (at considerable taxpayer expense) or allow most defendants to post a bond promising to show up for trial.
Another crime control mechanism is mandatory-minimum sentencing, which requires a defendant to be sentenced to a mandatory sentence if convicted. Instead of allowing a judge or prosecutor to agree on light punishment, certain acts require a strong sentence. Americans need more mandatory minimums, not fewer. Strong sentences protect communities from violent felons and make neighborhoods safer, particularly for inner-city residents and blacks. Also, mandatory minimums reduce the likelihood that the personal bias of a judge or prosecutor will affect sentencing, which often results in under- or over-punishment. Bad actors and their bad acts would all be treated the same, regardless of their status or wealth or even their personal narrative.
Finally, mandatory minimums give society a break from the violence of jailed perpetrators by insuring that there is a longer period where violent felons are held behind bars. The logic is simple: the greater the punishment for a crime, the more likely a criminal will reconsider the behavior. The opposite is true as well: the lower the punishment threat, the more likely bad actors will continue to engage in criminal behavior.
Mandatory sentences help to reduce crime wherever they are in place. Progressives believe that punishment isn’t the key to lowering crime. They argue that prison and related punishments are part of society’s efforts to target blacks and other minorities.
President Biden should be working with Congress to expand mandatory sentencing for murder, rape, robbery, and arson and offer grant assistance to states that do the same. If he were serious, he’d have the Justice Department direct prosecutors to ramp up mandatory sentencing in high-crime communities to stop violent crimes in its tracks.
