A nonpartisan immigration think tank has issued a report challenging misleading and false claims about immigrants prevalent in the presidential campaign season, including the frequent lie that up 20 million undocumented people live in the U.S.
Republican candidate Donald Trump has cited that number in promising to launch mass deportations if he is reelected, the Center for Migration Studies reported in “Correcting the Record: False or Misleading Statements on Immigration.”
“This is strongly overstated. According to estimates from the Center for Migration Studies of New York, 10.9 million undocumented immigrants reside in the United States, based on Census Bureau and American Community Service data. Other organizations, including the Department of Homeland Security, have produced similar estimates.”
Another contribution factor to the number of undocumented people living in the U.S. today is that more than 40% of that group have overstayed visas and did not illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border, as immigration opponents sometimes claim, the report says. “While the number of undocumented in the country increased by 650,000 from 2020 to 2022, other undocumented individuals and families, especially from Mexico and Asian countries, have been leaving the United States.”
Another falsehood confronted in the report is the assertion that 10 million or more migrants have poured through the border during President Biden’s term while the Trump administration had the lowest number in history.
The claim is misleading because the Department of Homeland Security describes border crossings as “encounters” that can result in migrants being returned to Mexico or deported to their home countries. “According to DHS, over 4 million migrants encountered have been returned and 20% to 25% encountered are repeat offenders, severely lowering the total amount during the Biden administration.”
“The Trump administration released a higher percentage of migrants into the country than the Biden administration, by 52.2% to 48.6% over a two-year period.”
Annual apprehensions at the border increased by almost 15% under Trump until the border was closed in 2020, CMS added. “Moreover, the Trump administration released a higher percentage of migrants into the country than the Biden administration, by 52.2% to 48.6% over a two-year period.”
Also untrue is the claim migrants are stealing jobs from U.S. citizens. According to the study, employment for citizens has risen by 7.2 million jobs since 2021 while job growth for immigrants increased by 5 million jobs.
“Studies also show that immigrants, legal or undocumented, complement the U.S. workforce and have helped increase jobs over the past few years, while also keeping inflation down,” the report notes.
Another bogus claim is that undocumented immigrants are bankrupting Social Security and Medicare.
“Undocumented immigrants who work pay $16 billion a year into the Social Security and Medicare systems and, because of their legal status, are not eligible to collect any benefits,” CMS noted. “Without the contributions of undocumented immigrants to both systems, they would likely grow insolvent within a shorter amount of time.”
Undocumented immigrants also are not exacerbating housing shortages as some assert, but are actually helping keep the problem from worsening.
“While the number of undocumented immigrants in the country has increased the demand for rental or other temporary housing, immigrant workers help produce housing, comprising 25% of the construction workforce,” CMS explains. “Deporting undocumented workers would hurt the housing market, as 1.3 million hold mortgages that would fail if they were deported. About 3 million undocumented persons, or nearly 30%, own a housing property, compared to 65% of U.S. citizens.”
Mass deportations would cost half a trillion dollars in taxpayers money, and $6 billion in taxes paid by undocumented workers would be lost to the United States Treasury.
The report also pushes back against the claim that undocumented residents are voting in U.S. elections, a falsehood disproved by federal bans on non-citizen voting and the looming threat of fines and deportation for violators.
Nor are immigrants more likely to commit violent crimes than U.S. citizens, the report explains. In fact, the opposite is true. “Studies have shown consistently over the years that immigrant communities are safer than nonimmigrant communities in the nation, and that immigrants commit crimes at a much lower rate than U.S. citizens. In fact, as the number of immigrants to the country has increased, crime in the United States has dropped.”
The report concludes by discrediting claims the nation would be better off if all undocumented residents were simply deported, explaining Trump’s mass-deportation plan would be damaging to the economy, families and to the rights of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike.
“Estimates have shown that such an operation would cost half a trillion dollars in taxpayers’ money, and that $6 billion in taxes paid by undocumented workers would be lost to the United States Treasury. In contrast, providing long-term undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship would increase the national GDP by $1.7 trillion over 10 years.”
Scarier still would be the methods to locate and round up undocumented immigrants under the Trump plan, CMS said.
“A mass deportation campaign also would create a police state, in which legal residents and U.S. citizens would be profiled and harassed by enforcement officials, including military personnel. A big question, for example, is how law enforcement would identify undocumented immigrants, given that most immigrants, regardless of their legal status, have an I-9 form and tax identification number. The prospect of camps operated by the U.S. military detaining migrants would conjure images of the Japanese internment camps during World War II.”
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