The effects of illegal immigration on the United States have been a major campaign issue for former President Donald Trump; nevertheless, a number of his talking points are inaccurate or deceptive. Among his immigration statements at recent events in Arizona and Nevada, two swing states for the presidential election, we discovered the following.
Trump’s tall tales
President Joe Biden’s declaration to restrict asylum eligibility, according to Trump, “establishes an annual minimum of approximately 2 million illegal alien border crossers.” He misrepresented the functionality of a smartphone app that schedules asylum appointments, claiming that it permits “free entry to be released into the United States at the push of a button.” Limited vacancies are made once applicants are reviewed. Trump presented vastly inflated figures about border crossings. He stated, for example, that “border crossings were up 1,000% compared to the same month last year” in April.
Apprehensions, a stand-in for unauthorized crossings, decreased by thirty percent. It is deceptive if Trump meant April 2020 rather than “last year.” Fears fell that month as a result of the outbreak. He misrepresented New York Times reporting to falsely assert that “many of those children are dead” and that “88,000” unaccompanied adolescents who entered the country illegally and were handled by the Biden administration “are missing.” “More drugs are coming into our country right now than at any other time in our history,” asserted Trump. Under Biden, federal statistics on drug seizures by weight are on the decline. Using such statistics as a stand-in for drug smuggling, it appears that less, not more, narcotics are entering the nation. Nonetheless, fentanyl seizures have skyrocketed under Trump and Biden.
Fact-checking the border
According to Trump, “300,000 people are dying a year” in the United States from drug overdoses, and the number “probably more than that.” 2022 saw 107,941 drug overdose fatalities, according to a government organization. A researcher from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention earlier informed us that any undercount “should be relatively small.”
“Virtually 100% of the new jobs under Biden have also gone to illegal aliens,” he falsely claimed. Employment of workers born in the United States has grown more than that of people born abroad, including those who are lawfully present in the country, since Biden took office as president in January 2021.
According to Trump, actual, or inflation-adjusted, salaries and income for Black people have decreased by 6% under Biden. However, real income for Black households has increased, according to the most current government data, but full-time Black workers’ actual salaries have decreased, albeit not as much as Trump claimed. The former president asserted that unions were “being absolutely slaughtered” and that illegal immigration under Biden had led to “flat-out economic warfare” against Black and Hispanic Americans by “taking the jobs” of those people. Statistics on employment and union membership don’t support that.
Immigration claims debunked
Trump made his first speech in a town hall meeting in Phoenix on June 6th, which was organized by organizations connected to the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA. On June 9, three days later, he gave a speech at a political event in Las Vegas. We’re simply paying attention to what Trump said on immigration in those talks. Trump reiterated his unsupported talking point that “the entire world is emptying their prisons and jails, insane asylums, and mental institutions” and transferring those individuals to the United States, in addition to the statements listed below. As we have stated several times, he has not offered any proof to support that bombshell allegation.
| Claim | Fact |
| Trump asserts that “illegal aliens” had gotten virtually all of the new jobs created by Biden. | According to statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, during May 2021, the number of employees who were born in the United States grew by around 4.5 million, but the number of employees who were born abroad climbed by roughly 5.1 million. |
| The mistake in Trump’s assertion is that the Bureau of Labor Statistics statistics does not discriminate between refugees, lawfully accepted immigrants, and temporary residents. | Trump makes up the story that nearly all of Biden’s new employment had gone to undocumented immigrants. |
| While foreign-born males are extremely driven to work in the US, the percentage of native-born men who are employed has been falling for decades. | The proportion of native-born men in the workforce has been declining for decades, despite the strong work ethic of males who were born outside of the US. |
The truth behind Trump’s rhetoric
In his Phoenix remarks, Trump falsely stated that individuals entering the southern border illegally are “coming in totally unchecked, unvetted,” and he further asserted that a recent proclamation by Biden to restrict asylum eligibility “establishes an annual minimum of approximately 2 million illegal alien border crossers.”
