Tucker Carlson won’t be spewing his anti-immigrant venom on Fox, but will the network keep doing it? | Opinion

Immigrants, minorities and anybody who opposes racism should celebrate Fox News’ decision to part ways with Tucker Carlson, the extreme right-wing television host who drew huge audiences by spreading conspiracy theories that Latin American migrants are ruining America.

The big question now is whether Fox News, presidential hopeful Donald Trump and other Republican hopefuls will continue perpetuating the lie that undocumented Latin American immigrants are driving up U.S. crime rates, spreading diseases and causing all kinds of other terrible problems.

Carlson’s nightly dose of xenophobia drew huge audiences by picking isolated examples of crimes committed by undocumented migrants and presenting them as a massive national scourge. In 2018, Carlson claimed that mass immigration was also making the United States “poorer and dirtier.”

However, it’s a fact that the United States needs more — not fewer — immigrants.

Carlson’s sensationalist claim that Latin American undocumented migrants are driving up crime rates, much like Trump’s 2016 statement that Mexican migrants are “bringing crime” and “are rapists,” is simply not true. Several studies show that undocumented immigrants commit far fewer crimes than U.S. citizens.

A multi-year study of crime rates in Texas showed that undocumented immigrants have “substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants.”

The study, based on data from the Texas Department of Public Safety, found that “U.S.-born citizens are over two times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and over four times more likely to be arrested for property crimes.”

What’s more, the United States desperately needs more immigrants to reduce work shortages, help fight inflation and pay taxes to maintain its growing numbers of retirees.

“The general idea that immigration hurts America couldn’t be farther away from the truth,” Dany Bahar, a professor of economic policy at Brown University, told me. “It’s based on a mix of ideology, resentment and racism. In fact, America cannot survive without immigrants.”

Bahar is the co-author of a Brookings Institution article stating that, in just 11 years, Americans over 65 will outnumber children under 18 for the first time in U.S. history. Unless Americans start having more babies, the country will need a big influx of young people — like the ones coming from Central America and Mexico — to maintain its Social Security system.

More immediately, the United States needs more immigrants to reduce labor shortages in restaurants, hotels and construction sites, and to do several other jobs that Americans don’t want to do. These shortages are making goods more expensive and driving up inflation.

Last year, there were 565,000 unemployed people in the accommodation and food services industry, while the number of job openings was 1.4 million, Bahar says. Even if all unemployed workers in that industry returned to work, there would still be 835,000 job openings, he says.

Likewise, by 2025 the United States will face a shortage of about 660,000 home health aides, lab technicians and nursing assistants, according to the Mercer financial services company.

The current labor shortages, by helping drive up inflation, have also forced the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates in an effort to cool off the economy, Bahar says. That, in turn, is making loans more expensive and hurting American home and car buyers.

“Americans need to know that xenophobia is an expensive choice,” Bahar wrote in a recent paper with Harvard professor Ricardo Hausman.

Allowing more immigrants into the country would be one of the easiest ways to help the U.S. economy, but the anti-immigration hysteria created by people like Carlson has made it almost impossible to update the outdated 1986 U.S. immigration law.

When faced with the facts, Carlson and his fellow fear mongers claim that they are only against “illegal” immigration. But that’s a false excuse to protect themselves from being called racists, because they also have consistently opposed a comprehensive immigration reform that would both secure the border and allow more legal immigrants in.

Let’s celebrate that Carlson will no longer be able to spread his nightly venom on Fox News. But more important, let’s demand that Fox News, Trump and other populists to stop using the fear of immigrants to draw bigger audiences, or votes. America needs a comprehensive immigration reform with more — yes, more — immigrants.

Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show on Sundays at 8 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Blog: www.andresoppenheimer.com