Both candidates made false or misleading claims regarding immigration during the Presidential Debate. Please “Take 5” to educate yourself about the facts. Below is a superficial overview. To learn more visit The Washington Post, Associated Press and CNN.
CLAIMS BY JOE BIDEN:
Claim: Border crossings dropped 40 percent since he placed limits on asylum seekers in early June, better numbers than when Trump left office.
Fact: The number of daily encounters at the border dropped 40 percent following Biden’s executive action but were generally lower during the Trump administration.
Claim: Biden said the Border Patrol union endorsed him, and then appeared to clarify and said the group “endorsed (his) position.”
Facts: The National Border Patrol Council backed a bipartisan border deal reached by senators that included some of the toughest security measures in recent memory but didn’t endorse Biden. The deal failed in the Senate.
CLAIMS BY DONALD TRUMP
Claim: Said twice that Biden will destroy Social Security and Medicare by giving migrants entering the US those benefits.
Fact: Immigrants who are working legally typically won’t collect benefits for many years. As for those who are undocumented, some are working under fake Social Security numbers, so they are paying payroll taxes but don’t qualify to collect benefits. The Social Security Administration found that earnings by unauthorized workers amounted to roughly $12 billion on net. Meanwhile, unauthorized immigrants contributed more than $35 billion on net to Medicare’s trust fund between 2000 and 2011.
Claim: “These killers (migrants) are coming into our country, and they are raping and killing women.”
Fact: Preliminary statistics show that crime in the US dropped significantly in 2023 and in the first quarter of 2024, with a steep drop in murders and other violent offenses, even as the number of people crossing the southern border spiked. While some undocumented immigrants have been charged with high-profile crimes during the Biden and Trump presidencies, research has generally found no connection between immigration levels and crime – and has sometimes found that undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than people born in the US.
Claim: “The only jobs he (Biden) created are for illegal immigrants and bounce back jobs that bounce back from the covid.”
Fact: This claim implies that migrants are taking jobs from native-born workers. But employment for the native-born population has increased by almost 6.8 million under Biden. Employment of foreign-born workers increased about 5 million from February to May 2021, including those legally authorized to work in the US.
Claim: Other countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions and sending the former residents here.
Fact: Simply not true.
Claim: There were 18, 19 or 20 million people who entered the US through the southern border during the Biden Administration
Fact: According to Customs and Border Patrol, the true figure is about 5 million.
