Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) is a bad politician, and not a very good human being either.
Tuberville rode into the U.S. Senate on name familiarity and sports mania, defeating the former U.S. Attorney who sent two Klansmen to prison for the 1964 Birmingham church bombing.
The last time I posted about Tuberville (here), I described him as “dumber than a box of rocks” with “a vacuum between his ears” and characterized his appearance on Maria Bartiromo’s Fox show as “two fenceposts having a conversation.”
Before you accuse me of intemperate name-calling, this guy really is that dumb, and now he’s doing exactly that by calling migrants “garbage” (see story here).
He’s brainlessly parroting Trump’s falsely claimed (story here) that migrants at the U.S. southern border are criminals and insane asylum inmates sent by their governments.
Many are children, but they’re trash in Tuberville’s eyes, because they were born somewhere else. Would he say that about white refugees who speak English?
Most Central and South American migrants are fleeing economic deprivation, gang violence, and political turmoil or repression in their home countries.
Most Mexican migrants come here to work, and America needs them. Their field labor provides Americans with cheap food. Try hiring a gardener or roofer if they’re deported.
Migrants aren’t draining Social Security. Workers don’t get Social Security, they pay into it. Noncitizens are ineligible for benefits, so migrant workers get nothing back from their payroll taxes. They help Social Security and Medicare afloat for the rest of us.
What about crime? Any large population includes criminals, but migrants have lower crime rates than our citizens. That makes sense, because they come here to support their families, and have a strong incentive to keep a low profile. If you want to reduce crime, then deport citizens and keep the illegals.
Fentanyl is not coming across the border in the pockets and knapsacks of migrants wading across the river and climbing through barbed wire barriers to waiting border patrol agents. Drugs enter through border crossings in shipping containers on trucks. Cutting off the flow of migrants, whether or not desirable for other reasons, would have zilch effect on the flow of drugs.
Tuberville doesn’t contribute serious dialogue to public discourse or policymaking. He’s a barking dog for his xenophobic party. Immigration is a legitimate subject of debate, but labeling other human beings who just want to catch a break as “garbage” is spewing hate.
Photo below: These children are “garbage” according to Alabama’s junior Republican senator.
