Amber Ruffin patiently debunks conservatives' dusty scaremongering about undocumented immigrants

At the top of her Friday Amber Ruffin Show piece on immigration in America, Amber Ruffin made reference to “a certain kind of person” who, in addition to referring to undocumented immigrants with the intentionally offensive label “illegals,” are also more likely to approve of guns in schools than Black history. You know who you are, and if you’re congenitally or through diligent effort immune to actual, not-hysterical facts about the complex issue of immigration delivered by one of the most effortlessly charming and ebullient people on television, please feel free to click over to one of those websites where red-faced, sweaty boys scream about QAnon and lizard people, taking a breath only to advertise branded taint wipes and survivalist rations.

As Ruffin enumerated through her usual chipper parade of smiley common sense, the conservative media’s resurgent cries of “BORDER CRISIS!” have no factual resonance outside of that yawningly empty-headed Fox News and Facebook echo chamber. “Like, at all,” is how Ruffin began her segment, referring to those pesky, readily available facts and figures that somehow never seem to make it past the fingers shoved in conservatives’ ears. Again, if you’re currently covering your eyes as well as plugging your ears at the prospect of having your most sweatily gripped racist beliefs undermined by the real world, then, please, enjoy your life choices. (Also, props for managing to block all four holes at once.)

Ruffin put Fox’s favorite talking points up on the screen behind her, only to cross them off, one by one, after also putting up some inconvenient truths. Myth: There’s an immigration crisis. Fact: The number of undocumented immigrants has declined steadily since 2007. Myth: Undocumented immigrants are more likely to be drug smugglers, terrorists, or just garden-variety criminals. Fact, according to Amber: “I grouped these three together because they’re all equal parts bullshit.” Mexican drug cartels are more likely to use planes, submarines, or their just discovered solar-powered underground train system to smuggle drugs into the hands of ravenous American illegal drug consumers than to just “asking people to frickin’ jog across the border.” Ruffin also noted that even the Trump administration said there was “no credible information” that a single terrorist crossed into the U.S. through Mexico. (And those guys were really looking.)

And then there’s the old tried-and-true terror campaign by (white) conservative talking heads about gangs of brown people roaming (white) neighborhoods, committing all sorts of foreign-accented atrocities. As Ruffin explained (again, with the sort of documentation that acts upon loudmouth bigots like garlic on vampires), actual studies have shown that the crime rate in immigration-rich communities is lower than those scaredy cat, all-’Murican ones. Ruffin also pointed out that, since research shows that crime is fostered most by poverty and a lack of educational opportunities, it’s even more striking that undocumented immigrants—who have less of both than anybody—buck that trend. Sort of like they deserve extra credit for being decent people, or something.

Ruffin also called some cheerful bullshit on the oft-cited (by conservatives with white supremacist and/or authoritarian agendas) study that used some seriously dishonest extrapolation to buoy the nonsense claim that American elections are being stolen by millions upon millions of undocumented immigrants voting illegally. (Ruffin noted that said study found five whole cases of voter fraud, which is—checking calculator—slightly less than the 22 million sneak-voters “certain people” were claiming robbed the sex predator former reality show host president of a second term.) In the end, Ruffin noted that all this strategically deployed Fox and friends’ fear-mongering says “a lot more about white people’s fears about people who don’t look like them than it does about immigrants.” Go on and take your fingers out now—you’ll no doubt need them to write some fact-averse, racist gibberish in the comments.