Hate Crime

Louisiana is poised to enact a law that would make it a hate crime to target police officers and other first responders.

Dubbed the “Blue Lives Matter” bill,  HB 953 would expand the state’s hate-crime law to include police officers as a protected class, as well as a broad swath of uniformed employees and emergency volunteers.

Bigotry as a factor to be applied in sentencing?  Maybe.  But that, like all sentencing, should be for a jury to decide, not a government with a one-size-fits-all sentencing “guideline,” the (limited) feasibility of which, anyway, stems only from overparsing crimes.

An Aspect of Europe We Might Want to Emulate

Or at least one nation of Europe….

Germany has preliminarily approved an immigrant assimilation law.

Under the draft integration law, which now goes to parliament for approval, migrants would have to fulfill certain requirements, such as taking special classes, and authorities would be entitled to decide where in the country they should live. Those who don’t comply could face sanctions.

At the same time, the integration law aims to facilitate access to the job market and to apprenticeship programs for refugees, allowing them to more quickly earn a living.

Among the requirements:

  • language training
  • education in German laws
  • education in cultural basics
  • states will be able to decide where refugees should live in their state…avoid the creation of ethnic ghetto

We already do—or used to do—a pretty good job of assimilating our immigrants.  One thing we could benefit from, though, is a mechanism to better control initial living locations, so as to mitigate our own Little [China/Italy/Syria/etc) problem and to improve assimilation.

And so to better preserve our American culture.