It’s unclear to me if Rep. Rich Nugent actually believes what he is saying or if he just thinks its politically expedient to make racist comments about Central American culture.
A Florida Republican congressman called undocumented immigrant children at the border not children at all but gang-affiliated persons from a culture of thievery, murder, and violence.
“A lot of these children … quote-unquote … ya know, the first caller mentioned it, ya know, they’re gang members. They’re gang affiliated,” Florida Republican Rep. Rich Nugent said on WOCA radio Monday.
Nugent added that the culture the children were coming from was one of violence and there would be a complications in bringing the children into American culture.
“Listen, if you’re 14, 15, 16, 17 years old, and you’re coming from a country that’s gang-infested — particularly with MS-13 types, that is the most aggressive of all the street gangs — when you have those types coming across the border, they’re not children at that point. These kids have been brought up in a culture of thievery. A culture of murder, of rape. And now we are going to infuse them into the American culture. It’s just ludicrous.”
It’s true that Central America is experiencing a lot of gang-related violent crime and that there is a disturbingly high murder rate throughout the region. But to characterize them as having a culture of thievery, murder, and rape is aggressively insensitive.
Furthermore, the people who are fleeing are not the gang members but the people who don’t want to be in gangs or be subjected to their violence. Insofar as gangs are directly involved with the border crisis it is as extorters and exploiters of these children and their families.
