Kris Kobach Got Rich Selling a Fake Immigration Crisis to Small Towns
Kansas Secretary of State and gubernatorial candidate Kris Kobach has made a career for himself out of selling sham crises, such as the need for voter ID to combat nonexistent voter fraud and the need for rampant Fourth Amendment violations to catch undocumented immigrants in the act of living. Apparently, he’s made a decent chunk of change stirring up xenophobia among gullible elected officials in small towns as well.
Per the Kansas City Star and ProPublica (emphasis mine):
Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Mo. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hardline anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.
But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them.
After two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there — something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.
Valley Park, of course, had no “immigration crisis”; the Star says that the uptick in the town’s Latinx population went from 2% to 3% in 2006, an increase of roughly 50 people in a town of 7,000. A former mayor of Valley Park, Grant Young, described Kobach’s behavior to the Star and ProPublica as “ambulance chasing.”