90-day nonsense

re: "A lesson in migration policy" (BP, PostBag, January 22, 2023) 

Dear editor,

In his diatribe against immigrants, Ben Levin displays true zealousness. He writes of "millions of illegal aliens, phoney 'asylum seekers' and foreign criminal gangs ... destroying the Western world." He sounds very much a Trumpish acolyte preaching the need to cleanse the nation of social vermin from "sh*thole countries", as Donald Trump himself put it with his usual eloquence in his rousing speeches to the deplorables who love him. It is a base appeal to ignorant bigotry. 

The facts regarding rates of criminal behaviour: in "Comparing Crime Rates Between Undocumented Immigrants, Legal Immigrants, and Native-born US Citizens in Texas" published in  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dec. 2020 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2014704117), the authors analyzed data from the Texas Computerized Criminal History (CCH) database provided by the Texas Department of Public Safety. The major finding was  "that undocumented immigrants had substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses", including violent crime, where native born Americans are twice as criminal, drug-related crime (2.5 times) and property crime, where native borns are recorded as being 4 times as criminal as illegal immigrants. 

In the US, it is the native born Americans who threaten to "destroy[] the Western world" as Mr Levin puts it. The the far less criminal illegal immigrants working hard and honestly for a better life for themselves and families are, by comparison, law-abiding and productive members of society, supporting what Mr. Levin's native borns are harming.

Mr Levin also overlooks a rather obvious fact: any nation that has a problem with illegal immigrants can quickly and easily solve it. All that is required is for a strong leader to do the right thing and legalize the honest immigrants eager to contribute to the nation that they have freely chosen to make their home, rather than having been born into it by accident and seeing it as something batten on. For a Christian or Buddhist nation, it is particularly hard to see how a nation that is richer and better than those wracked by political chaos and the poverty it causes can deny honest people fleeing those evils the opportunity to benefit the nation they would eagerly make their families' homes.

As to Mr Levin's even sillier, albeit less ignorantly bigotted, claims about 90-day reports, I am confident that your average foreign criminal operating in Thailand, for example those famous Chinese criminals so much in the news recently, has their 90-day reports properly crossed and dotted for inspection. There is no evidence and no reason to think that 90-reporting has any effect whatsoever on criminal activity by foreigners. How could it? Would Mr. Levin suddenly become criminal did he no longer have to report every 90 days?  

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The above letter to the editor is the text as submitted by Felix Qui to the Bangkok Post.

The text as edited was published in PostBag, severely truncated, on January 24, 2023, under the title "90-day nonsense" at https://www.bangkokpost.com/opinion/postbag/2489922/road-death-lottery