7 inconvenient truths about immigration Donald Trump elects to ignore
Yes, his policies are racist and xenophobic. But they're also entirely divorced from reality
Topics: AlterNet, Mexico, Immigration, illegal immigration, GOP, Elections News, Politics News
What will it take to get a majority of Republicans and an even bigger slice of Donald Trump supporters to reconsider their mistaken beliefs about Mexican immigrants and border enforcement? Though it’s unlikely, one might begin with the facts.
This week, a nationwide survey by Public Policy Polling reported that 51 percent of Republicans—and 63 percent of Trump supporters—would support a constitutional amendment to take U.S. citizenship away from children born in this country to the parents of undocumented immigrants. Their support for this exceptionally punitive measure, which, practically speaking is going nowhere, follows Trump’s ongoing and unapologetic comments that illegal Mexicans are a source of American woes.
Yet, according to academics and other demography experts, what’s been happening in the real world of U.S.-Mexico immigration trends and border enforcement is exactly the opposite from what Trump is bellowing and his flock is nodding their heads to.
The facts are that undocumented Mexican immigration has been going down during all of President Obama’s tenure; it peaked in 2007. Moreover, Trump’s remedy—a new wall—has largely been in place (fences, sensors, drones, patrols). But because his white and aging following grew up in a less diverse America following World War II, it will be hard to dislodge their racist perceptions and xenophobic views.
Here are seven facts that Trump and his flock are ignoring:
1. Undocumented Immigrant Numbers Have Fallen. According to a July report by the Pew Research Center, the total U.S. population of undocumented immigrants in has fallen in recent years and was 11.3 million people in 2014. “The population has remained essentially stable for five years, and currently makes up 3.5 percent of the nation’s population. The number of unauthorized immigrants peaked in 2007 at 12.2 million, when this group was 4 percent of the U.S. population.” In other words, this cannot be called a beckoning and burgeoning crisis.
2. Undocumented Mexicans Have Declined As Well. Pew noted that while Mexicans comprise a little more than half of all undocumented U.S. immigrants (52 percent), their numbers have been declining. “There were 5.9 million Mexican unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. in 2012, down from 6.4 million in 2009,” according to Pew estimates.
Again, Trump is portraying a false boogeyman. Other academic experts who have studied the issue for years, such as academics at Princeton University’s Mexican Migration Project, describe the trend even more starkly. “Net unauthorized migration from Mexico to the U.S. has been zero or negative since 2008,” its research team wrote in the winter 2014 edition of International Migration Review.
“We find that undocumented migration from Mexico reflects U.S. labor demand and access to migrant networks and is little affected by border enforcement,” they explained, citing the underlying economics. “Mass undocumented migration from Mexico appears to have ended because of demographic changes there.”
3. As Mexico Ages, Would-Be Immigrants Shrink. Those demographic changes are a shrinking number of 15 to 24-year-olds in Mexico—the age cohort of the largest cohort of immigrants, the Princeton researchers found. This age group was only 18 percent of the population in 2015, The New York Times reported. That’s down from 22 percent in 2009 and is expected to fall to 16 percent in 2015, it reported. So, here too, is another factor that lessening unauthorized immigration from Mexico—not increasing it.
4. Last Summer’s Border Crisis Doesn’t Change These Trends. In 2014, an estimated 60,000 unaccompanied children from Central American massed at the border, seeking to get into the U.S. and prompting the federal government to set up processing centers—as Republicans criticized Obama for not taking a tougher approach. (They ignored that his administration had deported more migrants than any prior White House.) That refugee crisis was reflected in recent Census data, which has lead some republicans to suggest that a new historic tide of immigrants was beginning.
The Center for Migration Studies asked in a mid-August analysis if there was a surge. It concluded, “it is highly improbable based on: (1) the essentially unchanging patterns of apprehension data in the past few years; (2) the fact that the higher numbers in 2014 and 2015 are within the range of previous random fluctuations in the CPS data; and (3) the likelihood that the numbers for recent years partially reflect the return migration of previous legal residents; and (4) the fact that at least one of the conditions that brought about the significant reductions in unauthorized immigration over the past 15 years – enhanced immigration enforcement – is still in place and in fact has been augmented in recent years.”
5. More States Are Seeing The Undocumented Leave Than Stay. Before following up on the Center for Migration Studies’ last point—that until Obama issued his executive orders suspending some enforcement, his administration was deporting migrants—it’s worth noting that more states have seen undocumented populations fall than rise.