Liberal myths
.
Myth: "Crisis" talk is just conservative scaremongering.
Reality: Illegal immigration has skyrocketed under Joe Biden. Both Obama and Trump averaged about 35,000 migrants per month. Biden has averaged nearly 200,000 per month.
Myth: There is broad support for liberal immigration laws.
Reality: This used to true, but not anymore. In Gallup polls, support for increased immigration rose steadily for many years, reaching 34% in 2020. Since then it has plummeted. Support for increased immigration is currently at 16% compared to 55% who want it decreased. 86% think illegal immigration is a serious problem. Support for building the wall has risen above 50%.
Conservative myths
.
Myth: We are currently in the middle of a migrant crime wave.
Reality: There's no evidence for this. Crime has declined substantially over the past few years, and multiple studies have found that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native borns.
Myth: Central American countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending their inmates to the US.
Reality. This is flatly made up. There is no evidence this is happening.
Myth: Illegal immigrants are taking jobs away from Americans who need them.
Reality: The employment rate of native borns remains near pre-pandemic highs. Generally speaking, illegal immigration rises when there are labor shortages in low-wage jobs that Americans don't want. These are typically jobs that require no English and can be paid under the table. Natives and legal immigrants work almost exclusively in conventional jobs that require English skills.
Myth: Illegal immigrants don't pay taxes and will eventually bankrupt Social Security.
Reality: Illegal immigrants pay sales taxes, property taxes (via rent), and even some income taxes and payroll taxes. However, they are not generally eligible to receive Social Security, so they make the program stronger, not weaker. Likewise, they are ineligible for most welfare benefits. They are eligible for schooling and emergency medical care, but the taxes they pay makes this roughly a wash. Overall, illegal immigration is a (small) net positive for the US economy.
I am so tired of these old lies but telling the truth doesn’t seem to help. Folks believe what they want.
Do folks not support liberalized immigration because they believe the conservative myths? is that why they think the border is a crisis instead of a problem?
If a "myth" can switch back and forth over time between true and false in the way you're using it, don't you think you're misusing the term?
They aren't switching back and forth. Please try again.
Or better yet, don't.
The one about public support for immigration really has switched, from favorable to unfavorable in just a few years.
We typically use "myth" to describe something that is always untrue, while most of the statements covered here are more like popular assumptions, which could be right or wrong depending on context.
No. Support for increased immigration has never had a plurality, let alone a majority of public opinion. https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx#:~:text=Through%202011%2C%20the%20percentage%20wanting,declined%20to%2026%25%20in%202023.
Thanks for sharing this, Kevin. My questions is: *why* has immigration been increasing under Biden? Is there a specific policy?
Pent up demand after Covid perhaps?
but is it adjusted for inflation?
i don't know but i'd guess it's mostly basic economics, and the strong US economy means more jobs are available. and probably deteriorating economic and political conditions wherever they're coming from.
People coming from Central and South America are risking their lives and the lives of their children. There must be some reason that is so highly motivating them to risk it all to come here. Meanwhile, according to stuff I’ve seen from Pew Research, Immigration from Mexico is down with more people actually returning than coming.
says something about maga racist & homophobic & misogynist populism when morena misogynist & homophobic & racist populism looks like the better deal.
If we are really lucky, Drum will take a peak at the comment section and decide to research this. In the mean time, here are some possibilities:
1) Perception. You can see a big increase when Biden took office. The timing suggests that immigrants were more likely to try to enter under Biden because of a perception, true or not, that it would be easier to enter the United States illegally under Biden than under Trump.
2) Specific policies. Biden did get rid of a few Trump policies that seemed to be more about performative cruelty than controlling the border. I doubt these policies had much effect. If they did, it doesn’t show up in the data.
In the 1990’s, the United States tightened up border security, and immigrants started dying while attempting to cross the border. Once you’ve tightened border security to the point where the only people coming across are people who are willing to die in the attempt, it’s difficult to reduce the flow further. People determined enough that they are willing to risk death to enter the United States are hard to stop. So it may be that the level of illegal immigration is more affected by events in Central and South America than by anything the United States President does.
Maybe support for "a wall" is up, but the fact of the matter is that Trump's wall expenditures cost billions and, quite obviously, have stopped almost no one. You would think the "waste and fraud" crowd would care about that but, of course, they don't as it is waste and fraud they like.
where's bill proxmire when you need to give out another golden fleece?
I've wondered this for a while: how do we actually *know* that the number of migrants has increased? The statistic I keep seeing is that more of them are being *caught* (and it's weird that conservatives complain about that, because I thought that's what they *wanted* to happen). But I have no idea how many people used to arrive *without* being caught. We've put a lot of money into increasing enforcement, so I would expect to catch more, even if the raw number of migrants had stayed the same.
During the 2016 presidential campaign I did a bit of searching border patrol statistics. Most undocumented immigrants came through the regular checkpoints. The stats for the number of immigrants crossing outside of checkpoints was (obviously) a lot harder to nail down, but one figure I noted was that the number of immigrants actually caught crossing outside of checkpoints was quite low compared to the number of CBP agents assigned to the duty.
I suggested (in Kos) that maybe it would be more cost efficient to simply deputize the intercepted immigrants and have them bring in the others. Save the CBP resources and put more money into faster processing and return. /s
these are terrible statistics to make these points. “encounters” is something reported by the border patrol, which is full of Trumpers. it’s made up. and incarceration rate ≠ crime rate. But Kevin will do anything to both-sides the debate.
Encounters means that there are more people trying to cross and getting stopped. Complaining about that and calling it a crisis is as idiotic as blaming your roof because now it rains more than it used to. Then again, Conservatives have been a bunch of morons for a long time, and people who should know better tend to give some value to their every idiotic rant.
Clearly all those conservatives are pining for jobs in landscaping or vegetable picking.
pining for black people to have those jobs.
Or cooking and cleaning in restaurants from Tony Bourdain:
The biggest myth surely is that the quickest and cheapest way to stop illegal immigration is NOT to toss a big employer in jail. Meatpacking industry anyone?
Right.
But there are economic migrants, who only come because an American has a job for them. That rises and falls with the economy, here and there. Cracking down on industries like meatpacking would reduce that.
Then there are the people fleeing terror and violence, gang and governmental. We have a moral and legal obligation to them.
Doing that would raise prices at the grocery store!
the baking cakes with files in them budget would be thru the roof at cargill.
those costs would be passed on to the consumer.
Republicans are promising the largest mass deportation in history. The fact that many Democrats think there is an illegal immigration crisis is going to aid that. It is actually the thing that scares me most regarding a second Trump “presidency”. He will use his dictatorial powers to make good on that promise and use the military to make it happen and to quash opposition to his complete takeover of the government. I know Kevin thinks that unlikely but I am less optimistic.
Millions of “illegals” have lived in the U.S. for over 20 years. They have productive lives and families and Trump and his hatred army are ready to use military force and Nazi tactics to root them out. If successful millions of native born children will also be deported. It could get really ugly Stephen Miller will be in charge. It is his dream job.
it won't just be illegals.
us citizens with mexican, filipino, congolese, cambodian, etc, names will get caught up in the chaos of the removals & be "returned" to places they have never been & don't have citizenship rights, thus becoming stateless persons.
the process to get back to the maralago principate will be arduous & many won't live long enough to see america again.
Illegal immigration ATTEMPTS are up because Fox/WSJ/GOP are broadcasting that the border is wide open. Perhaps augmented by a few million in travel money from Vlad. Wake UP. The GOP has a history of dirty tricks treason starting with the generals' coup attempt against FDR.
Yep that is my sneaky suspicion too. Also a coup attempt is a very real danger if Trump doesn't win.
The challenge with enforcing immigration and asylum rules was that Congress didn't give any meaningful increase in support, the courts actively sabotaged any Biden effort to reform the CBP for months, and Biden's people treated the issue as a hot potato and essentially no one stepped for a long time on it - they were hoping it would somehow "go away" and to the extent that anyone did anything on it, it was dumped on Kamala Harris.
Wouldn’t social spending on non working immigrants qualify as a liberal myth?
With so many immigrants coming in, those who can’t work can’t pay taxes but still need social services- hospitals, food and housing. That means tax dollars, which our haves are well versed in avoiding, and our have-nots don't pay, so those taxes get paid for by our middle class.
Liberal myth or not, it's more fuel for Cruz and Hannity 🙁
having worked in social services (during the bush-43 & obama years), I can tell you with authority that the us born children of undocumented persons can qualify for medicaid & their households can get snap benefits for those same citizens children, but the foreign-born parents & any children they brought with them cannot & will not.
Birthright citizenship avoids creating a class of stateless persons. That the MAGAs could even think about eliminating it is an expression of ignorance or cruelty.
If you want to bestow birthright citizenship, then Dems need to stand up and tell Americans- "this is what this policy will cost"
It's not a break even deal. It doesn’t matter if dad and mom work their tails off for no benefits. We pay for Medicaid/Snap etc for the kids, and for anyone in the family not working, and even working parents if they even need one trip to the ER.
Worse yet, there’s the incentive of anyone in a Latin American hellhole neighborhood to walk here. “Locals may hate me but at least my family is fed, housed and safe.” Wouldn’t you walk here?
Tweeto & Fox have a field day. “Higher taxes? Fewer jobs?” - illegal immigrants !
To me the difference between Dems & GOP is that GOP's help to the bottom tier is soup kitchens and ERs. Obviously it's going to cost us more to give the poor healthcare and a living wage, but add on undocumented folks and the tab gets bigger and the GOP has their opening into an otherwise great 4 years.
The GOP has played this well- approving zero extra money for patrolling and processing capabilities, so desperate arrivals jump the fence. No easy answer but when even blue cities are saying they can handle no more, the “nation of Immigrants” pitch is wearing thin.
If not for the immigration issue, the GOP would have zero to complain about. Given all the arrivals when Trump was in power, what did the Dems think was going to happen when they won??? The chaos at the border was completely predictable. So what did dems do?- Send Kamala there for a photo op!
"If you want to bestow birthright citizenship, then Dems need to stand up and tell Americans- 'this is what this policy will cost'"
Excuse me, asshole, but this country already has birthright citizenship, and has had it for the better part of two centuries. In fact, it's how most of us citizens are citizens.
If you don't like it, you can try to amend the Constitution, but otherwise stfu. It's not on us to justify a bedrock principle of american law.
Sure- when undecided voters asks about potential costs of our current birthright / immigration policy, “Excuse me asshole” will bring them right over to our side come November
Whether or not something is a 'crisis' is an opinion. It's not something you can prove or disprove.
Kevin has shown that recorded border encounters are high, although he clipped out the late 90s and 00s when encounters were similar. I dont think that anyone is disputing the official figures.
The natural inclination to 'both-sides' every issue is comical. Kevin seems to view this situation as a crisis, but thats just his opinion.
But border encounters are not a measure of illegal immigration, only a measure of the number of undocumented people actually living here is. They give no information at all about that.
Yes, good point.
Like all good 'both-side'isms', Kevin playing fast and loose with the facts and data. This is almost a requirement of a good 'scold both sides' article.
I was an illegal immigrant for six or seven years in the earlu 90s. Durin that time, I paid sales taxes, property taxes, income tax, payroll taxes for a dozen people who worked for me, and corporate taxes. Not particularly unusual.
Umm... I think the statistic labelled "Illegal Immigration" is something else. I don't think there is actually any reliable statistic measuring illegal immigration.
I live in Germany, there is plenty of immigration, but relatively little illegal immigration. Because in Germany everybody has to register where they live and they actively check for illegal immigrants in employment (mostly on building sites) and give fines for people employing people illegally. Trying to stop people coming in over a long land border is a losing game, much better to control them via bureaucratic checkpoints like address registration, medical services and employment. Bureaucracy has its uses, and it is a myth that bureaucracy is only something that government imposes, there is more private bureaucracy and public bureaucracy can actually reduce the need for private bureaucracy (by establishing things like address and identity officially).
everify would stifle business, though.
america can't have that.
I am a serial expat, married to an immigrant, parent of multi-lingual dual citizen children, work in an industry full of immigrants, and generally love immigration.
That being said, it’s driven me crazy of the decades how badly liberals botch this issue. In the end, it is very simple: Americans are amazingly generous towards safe, orderly, vetted, fair immigration, and rightfully intolerant of any other kind. This is true whether the latter is outright illegal, or a technically legal gaming of the rules. Unfortunately liberals spend almost all their political capital on this issue defending fence jumping and asylum abuse, rather that focusing on the kinds of immigration the public supports. It’s political idiocy of the highest order.
if real americans hate immigrant gameplaying & system abuse, why didn't the maga base demand the knavss family (including barron) be deported to slovenija?
As Bruce said above, the GOPer's keep telling everyone our border is open when a Democrat occupies the White House.
It's worse now for a number of reasons. Trump's administration broke the immigration system, tore up the agreements that helped to keep immigration in check and failed dealing with the situation in Venezuela.
During Covid, when immigration stopped due to public health rules, the people crossing the border were not deported back to their home countries and barred from entering the US for any reason--they were just dumped across the border into Mexico. There was a huge population living in camps in Mexico--and they came across again once the Covid restrictions were lifted--not by Biden, but by the courts.
Border crossings jumped once Covid restrictions were removed, and we still had a broken immigration system. Biden tried to work with Congress to fix it--but the Republicans kept blocking it. There is only so much a President can do without funding.
Republicans a very good at creating a crisis, dumping it on an incoming Democratic administration, then try to blame the Democrats for the original crisis.
I would have thought that Kevin would understand that "Encounters" are not a 1-1 proxy for migrants crossing without documentation. An "encounter" is what it sounds like, but if a migrant is encountered and sent back to Mexico and then crosses the border again, that is 2 encounters but only 1 migrant. Considering the pressure that CBP is putting on migrants to return to Mexico, it's irrational to assume that 200,000 encounters per month equates to 200,000 undocumented migrants per month. I expected better data presentation.
Also, with regard to support for increased immigration, the continued low levels of support might have something to do with both political parties constantly harping on undocumented immigrants, border security, etc. Since neither party makes any effort to show the benefits to the US of migration it makes sense that support for immigration would remain low.
200k per month seriously? So the assertion is that 5 million people have come across so far? I'm going to challenge that number.
Thank you. I was beginning to despair that anyone would do a simple reality check. As others have pointed out, these are people who have been CAUGHT and RETURNED, not those who have evaded detection. It's virtually certain that many of them have tried again and again, so the number is inflated by catching the same people multiple times.
Even if the 5 million figure included "Caught and Returned", that number is still to high, in my opinion, how much paperwork would be involved in processing, how much time, and how many officers?
Now if the Dem establishment (and the presumptive nominee...) could distill this post into a concise, straightforward, powerful 'meme' and just pound the table with it....people aren't ready for the truth? Hit them over the head with it until it hurts, and change the discourse from two defensively distorting and antithetical narratives to something everyone not ideologically blinded can see as the truth.
Pro tip for Kevin Drum: When busting right-wing myths, the phrase "...there is no evidence for this..." is meaningless to those who believe the myth. Evidence of any kind is not required to get them to accept myth as fact. Instead, use the more accurate and direct expression "This is a lie." It won't be any more convincing to true believers, but it has the benefit of not being a mealy-mouthed pussy-footin' euphemism.
Or 'this is completely imaginary'.
Outright calling something a lie will often cause Republican voters to retreat to saying that everything they hear is a lie so they're going with the one they like.
Yes, immigrants have replaced "natives" in some jobs and mass immigration does keep wages low. Actually the agricultural "low-wage jobs that Americans don't want" have mostly always been held by non-white underclasses - until the Civil War by slaves, then "free" African-Americans in the Jim Crow era, then temporary "braceros" starting in WW II, then largely illegal immigrants starting around 1970. Of course the African-Americans who did the agricultural work until WW II were moving to better jobs in manufacturing and other areas at that time so those jobs were not really "taken". If the agricultural jobs paid more then "Americans" would take them, but the influx of non-union immigrants who accept low wages is a main reason that agricultural wages aren't higher.
More recently immigrants have been taking over jobs outside agriculture, for example in construction and meat processing - this is undeniable. However immigration expands the economy (or prevents it from contracting) so that more jobs are created, so this is not a zero-sum matter. But again the immigrants are hired because they accept lower wages and it would be absurd to argue that there is no effect on wages. How important is this? Manufacturing jobs in particular are less available because of outsourcing, not because of immigration. Stuff in stores is made in China and other countries, not in the US by immigrants. The economic effects of illegal immigration have not been huge, but that is largely because of the way that most of the jobs they take have always been very low-paying, partly for cultural reasons.
Trump's appeal is based on racist xenophobia, but that doesn't mean that immigration is good for everyone. It's probably good for a lot of liberals who don't compete directly with immigrants for jobs - it keeps prices down. But keep in mind that if wages rise prices must rise also, so arguing for low prices is really arguing against wage increases (even if you could restrain corporate profits and executive compensation it would not have a huge effect).
Shouldn't America be a place where everyone can earn a decent wage and live like "Americans", rather than a stratified society where peons do the dirty work?
So, we need to spend more money on border enforcement. You know, I remember that a deal was cut, a really good deal, just earlier this year. For lots of new spending on border enforcement and stuff.
Do you know what killed it? Donald Trump killed it.
Every mention of "immigration" should be countered with this fact in some form. Trump killed the immigration deal, not because it was bad, but because it meant he couldn't run on it.
Trump doesn't want to solve problems, he wants to look good while doing nothing.
Yo, Kev! Could you maybe use specific language when talking about the border and immigrants? Specifically, the only number that should matter to anyone is the *number of immigrants entering and staying in the country.* The number of "encounters" on the border is immaterial, and could merely reflect more efficient border control. Which... is exactly what Republicans are demanding. So is the number you're citing a GOOD thing or a BAD thing? Because "encountering and stopping migrants at the border" is akin to "fentanyl seizures at the border," which is kinda the entire idea behind border control.
The obvious question is, why did the border crisis happen? My favoriate explanation is that the Trump kept screaming that we would have open border if Biden was elected - and people all over the world heard him.
What happened in early 2019 to cause that spike?