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By Jeff Ploussard
LILBURN, Ga. | The Trump campaign views the crisis at the southern border as their winning ticket to the White House. Campaign officials are constantly urging former President Trump to talk about “illegal aliens invading our country.”
Ploussard
The campaign is hoping the false claims will get Trump’s base to the polls and attract new independent swing voters including disaffected African and Hispanic Americans.
The Trump campaign was also relying on Vice President Harris to remain weak on border and immigration issues. Instead, Harris has been boldly touting her record as attorney general prosecuting “transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers” while slamming Trump for killing the toughest border security legislation in decades.
Here are five xenophobic, fear-based myths Trump is propagating.
Myth 1: Trump wants a solution to the border crisis: There is no evidence and ample to the contrary. The best example came last February when Trump told Republicans to kill a bipartisan border security bill because giving Biden-Harris a legislative victory would hurt his election bid. Trump’s Congressional MAGA followers obeyed and tanked the legislation.
The bipartisan bill included $118 billion to reassert control of the border, protect border communities, end catch and release, provide fentanyl scanners to catch smugglers and fix the asylum system. James Lankford, a Republican Senator from Oklahoma, led the bipartisan effort and this month on The Daily podcast told the story about how Trump torpedoed his legislation.
Myth 2: Immigrants steal jobs from Hispanic and African Americans: Studies have proven this to be a false claim. In David Card’s Nobel Prize winning paper on the 1980 Mariel Boatlift when over 125,000 Cubans emigrated to Miami in just five months, he proved that the immigration shock had no measurable impact on unemployment or wages in Miami and stimulated the local economy by adding 125,000 new consumers. (NPR and Planet Money).
Myth 3: All or most immigrants who come to the U.S. illegally commit crimes: A Texas study from 2012-2018 concluded that native-born U.S. citizens are two times more likely to be arrested for violent crimes, 2.5 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes and four times more likely to be arrested for property crimes than immigrants in the U.S. illegally.
Myth 4: Immigrants are an increasing burden on our social safety nets: It may come as a surprise to many, but taxes paid by baby boomers and immigrants in the last 40 years combined to restore the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. However, the birthrate of US born citizens has been falling since the 1960s and in 2020 reached an all-time low of 1.8 children per family. Without immigrant families paying taxes and filling the birth gap, Social Security and Medicare may have gone bankrupt by now.
Myth 5: Mass deportation and closing the border will help the economy: In Zeke Hernandez’s new book, The Truth About Immigration, he cites data that 14 percent of the U.S. population is foreign born, whereas on average 3.5 percent of the populations of other countries are foreign born. He argues that our comparatively open policy for immigrants is a competitive advantage and has created a dynamic vibrancy for job growth in the US economy for decades. Studies show that immigrants are 80 percent more likely than US citizens to start a new business.
Given the complex truths about immigration and the ongoing stream of disinformation, is there enough time for Harris to turn the border crisis into a winning issue that will catapult her to the White House?
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