Positive Immigration Data Debunks Republican Fear-Mongering
Trump and Republicans have relentlessly fear-mongered about immigrants. But the facts show immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US-born people and they boost the economy.
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America has been in the midst of an unrelenting fear-mongering campaign targeting immigrants. In spite of attempts at broad generalizations, the data overwhelmingly supports a positive immigration story that directly debunks Republican disinformation. Americans need to be informed of this objective reality.
Since Donald Trump descended the golden escalator of Trump Tower in 2015, we’ve been inundated with the same message over and over again. Trump walked up to the podium and called Mexican migrants rapists, beginning what would become the core message of his political career - targeting, scapegoating, and villainizing the “other.”
Over the past 9 years, Trump has constantly conflated law-abiding, asylum-seeking migrants with criminals and has sought to strip them of their humanity. Trump’s effort to dehumanize migrants has taken many routes. He has called migrants “animals,” generalized them as criminals, and repeatedly echoed Adolf Hitler by claiming non-white immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
Trump is echoing the same lies that have been told about immigrants for centuries while blatantly quoting 20th-century authoritarians.
Just last week, Donald Trump continued to specify that he’s really only talking about immigrants from non-white majority countries. Trump told donors at a fundraiser that immigrants need to be coming in from “nice” countries:
“These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster… Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries… Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
First off, migrants are not being sent to America from prisons and jails in other countries. Secondly, “nice” is a not-so-subtle way to say “white.”
Trump’s fundraiser comments came as he and his Republican allies have amplified anecdotes of what he calls “migrant crime,” claiming migration as a whole is causing a surge in crime across the US. That could not be further from the truth, especially since crime in the US is seeing record declines.
In fact, all available data indicates that immigrants contribute to our society culturally and economically. Not only do immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US, they boost the economy.
Immigrants aren’t lazy, raging criminals who “poison the blood of our country.” They’re actually hard-working, optimistic people who strengthen the fabric of our country.
As the son of two Sierra Leonean immigrants, I can personally attest to this. But I’ll let the data tell the story.
Let’s dive into the details.
How Immigrants Enrich America
The dominant Republican narrative is that immigrants are bringing crime into the US. In reality, multiple studies have found that undocumented immigrants and immigrants overall commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US.
Instead of a high crime rate, data shows high contributions to the US economy from immigrant populations.
On Friday morning, The New York Times published an article that headlined their digital homepage, explaining how immigrants are filling the labor gap in Maine and the rest of the country:
“Employers today are managing to hire rapidly partly because of the incoming labor supply. The Congressional Budget Office has already revised up both its population and its economic growth projections for the next decade in light of the wave of newcomers…
The new supply of immigrants has allowed employers to hire at a rapid pace without overheating the labor market. And with more people earning and spending money, the economy has been insulated against the slowdown and even recession that many economists once saw as all but inevitable as the Federal Reserve raised interest rates in 2022 and 2023.
Ernie Tedeschi, a research scholar at Yale Law School, estimates that the labor force would have decreased by about 1.2 million people without immigration from 2019 to the end of 2023 because of population aging, but that immigration has instead allowed it to grow by two million.”
Migrants are more entrepreneurial than Americans as a whole. And they’re not actually “stealing” American jobs to the extent Republicans claim. The Times article goes on to cite how “recent economic research has suggested that immigrants mostly compete with one another for work, since they tend to work in different roles from those of native-born Americans.”
I really liked this New York Times story. It not only detailed the broad economic benefits of immigration in America, but it also told personal stories and detailed immigration journeys of people who came here looking for a better life, and succeeded. We need more articles like this in media.
Maine’s labor force being reinforced by immigrants isn’t an anomaly. This is happening all over the US.
Last week, Semafor reported on a new analysis published by
- a research scholar at Yale Law School and former Biden White House economist. The findings spotlight just how much immigrants are contributing to America’s booming economy. It found that the “post-pandemic pickup in immigration accounted for at least one-fifth of the increase in U.S. gross domestic product since the end of 2019.”
The Semafor article went on to showcase what this means for the future with more stats from the CBO projections the Times piece also mentioned:
“By adding millions of new workers to the labor market, the immigration surge has lifted payrolls and growth, and potentially helped keep a lid on consumer prices…
Looking ahead, the CBO projected that thanks to higher immigration, the U.S. would have 5.2 million more workers over the coming decade than it had previously thought, juicing growth by $7 trillion and adding an extra $1 trillion in tax revenues to Washington’s coffers.”
The influx of migrants is also estimated to help bolster Social Security and Medicare as more Americans live well past the retirement age.
Steven Rattner, President Obama’s former Counselor to the Secretary of the Treasury and head of Obama’s Auto Task Force, shared a chart that showcased how migrants are shoring up an increasingly retired native-born workforce.
There are, of course, countless cultural contributions that immigrants have made to American society since our founding that can’t be quantified. But in this piece, I tried to stick to the quantifiable.
The data is overwhelming. Next time you see a fear-mongering immigration post on social media, share this article.
Tackling The Challenges Of Immigration Surges
All of this positive data is not meant to downplay the very real challenges and resource strains that surges in immigration can cause, but if approached correctly, we can drastically limit the downsides.
Many migrants have to wait months for asylum hearings and work authorizations. Solving key bottlenecks in the immigration process could reduce resource constraints, increase productivity, and allow these migrants to immediately start pursuing the life they came to America yearning for.
That’s what the bipartisan immigration bill sought to do before Trump ordered Republicans to tank it in an effort to benefit his 2024 campaign.
The bill proposed key changes Democrats prioritize - like additional asylum judges, increasing visa slots, increased access to work permits, legal representation for unaccompanied minors, and speeding up asylum claims. But it also made many concessions to conservatives.
On the other hand, the bill included broad border security measures conservatives demanded. There was a 5,000-per-day average border crossing threshold that, if crossed, would require the border to be shut down. It included more funding to expand detainment and modifications to catch-and-release. It was about as close to a border compromise as possible in this polarized political climate.
It’s unclear when or if we’ll get another bipartisan border deal in the next few years. But there is this existing framework that Biden can seek to revive if he wins re-election.
But if Trump wins, the dehumanizing immigrant crackdowns he proposes will have more negative impacts than positive. Trump promises to detain millions of immigrants in camps using local police and the National Guard, mass deportations, implement ideological screenings, end birthright citizenship, end student visas for people participating in pro-Palestine protests, and expand on his previous administration’s Mulsim ban.
This will not only cause a humanitarian crisis with families being separated and migrants being sent back to violent, impoverished situations they fled, but it will also eject all the economic contributions currently being made by migrants.
Americans need to consider all the consequences of electing Trump. He is not better on immigration policy than President Biden. He is only better at fear-mongering.
Since red state governors began their coordinated effort to bus migrants to Democratic cities, the impact of the border crisis has been more directly felt by non-border states. This has helped sway public opinion and helped Trump’s false narratives seep into the mainstream more forcefully.
But the positive data I discussed in this article shows just how wrong Trump is about immigrants. Americans shouldn’t fall for his lies.
