Actually it does. This is a example story that illustrates in concrete the argument that you can't blanket ban people by nationality without barring entrance to millions of amazing people who did nothing wrong.
That's the problem with emotional arguments; in a world of seven billion people, anybody's emotional defenses can be trivially overwhelmed in either direction on any topic. Every second you've been alive there has been incomprehensible-to-you amounts of joy and sorrow. It's not a valid argument to selectively scoop some of that out in a particular direction that someone happens to like, and you are being played every time someone does it to you.
To take an example of the latter, conservatives frequently cite the case of Kate Steinle, who was allegedly murdered in San Francisco a couple years back by an illegal immigrant who had been repeatedly deported but kept coming back. (I say allegedly because the defendant claims he stole the gun in a simple crime of opportunity and the fatal discharge was accidental. No motivation for the shooting was apparent at the time, so arguably it was a case of manslaughter rather than murder. Anyway...)
Now this case is frequently mentioned to highlight the supposed danger of allowing illegal immigrants to wander about freely. A quantitative analysis reveals that immigrants, even illegal ones, tend to commit fewer crimes on a per-capita basis than their legal neighbors, so hyping up this case to frighten people is misleading.
On the other hand, all that quantitative analysis isn't much comfort to all those who suffer when someone is killed, and ignoring that (because we can't easily quantify how sad a given tragedy is) undermines credibility in the quantitative approach because it runs counter to the fact of human experience. Soviet-style communism is a good example of crushing individual life through an unyielding adherence to the quantitative data preferred by bureaucrats, and we could find many other tragic examples from other political systems without having to look very hard.
tl;dr only looking at the aggregate data throws the baby out with the bathwater because we are emotional animals and emotional experience matters too.
I'd be interested in the source on that. I'm also curious if they're taking a blanket average, or if they account for the fact that a huge proportion of American crime occurs within a few square miles of blighted urban terrain in Chicago, DC, LA and Baltimore. For most people, such 'average' crime stats are irrelevant in the same way that skydiving death stats are irrelevant to someone who never skydives.
>we are emotional animals and emotional experience matters too.
But which emotional experience matters?
There are millions of relevant emotional experiences being had. You can't relate to all of them on an emotional level. So, the only question becomes which emotional experiences you choose to privilege above all the others and synchronize your own emotions to.
As parent indicated, this ultimately means surrendering your own motivational choices to whoever has the power to put emotional imagery in front of your monkey brain.
You become a slave to power, used to fulfill the goals of others, tugged blindly toward the beliefs they choose by the leash of your own pathological empathy.
As for which emotional experiences matter, you should evaluate a variety of them, including ones that make you uncomfortable. If you're not in a constant state of mild-self doubt or can't easily articulate opponents' line of reasoning then you're in a bubble.
As parent indicated, this ultimately means surrendering your own motivational choices to whoever has the power to put emotional imagery in front of your monkey brain.
No it doesn't. You are perfectly free to seek out other points of view and emotional experiences that you find unpleasant or distasteful. In the context of politics, one obvious reason to do so is to avoid being put on the defensive by an argument you haven't encountered before. I'm pretty far left but I probably spend more time reading conservative forums and blogs than liberal ones.
allegedly murdered