Friday January 26, 2024

Just a reminder that the border “crisis” is a fake crisis manufactured by Republicans - A) immigration is way down from previous decades, including hitting a low not seen since the previous century in the last few years, B) most illegal immigration does not occur via the border, and C) the common metric pointed to is mostly repeats/the same people being counted multiple times as border enforcement is 20 times what the US had a few decades ago:

  1. Immigration in recent years is nowhere near record highs. Net immigration 2022-2023 was 1.1M. During the 1990s it was ~2M/yr, and in many other years it was higher than now too (1950-2022 absolute numbers, see my first link for newer data released last month). And those are absolute numbers, so with the US population now 2.3x what it was in 1950, immigration rates now are correspondingly 2.3x lower.
  2. In recent years the US saw its lowest number of immigrants in ~a third of a century: “A shortfall in immigration has become an economic problem for America - The real crisis is not border crossings but a shortage of new arrivals” (The Economist). During that period that US had its lowest immigration levels in ~a third of a century, Fox News ran huge numbers of pieces claiming that there was a border “crisis”.
  3. Decade after decade, border enforcement has increased by many multiples. Previous enforcement benchmarks have been met, yet enforcement continues to grow.
  4. As we have increased border enforcement by many multiples, what is a record now is how many people we are “encountering” - but most of those “encounters” are actually (duplicate) people being counted more than once as they were “encountered” repeatedly. In actuality the number of repeats is even higher / the number of unique people is even lower than the official stats because if the same people are encountered 1 or more years since last time they are counted as unique people not a repeat.
  5. As an analogy, if a government increased their budget for stop-and-frisk or speed traps by 20x, should people be surprised, or call it a crisis, if far more frisking or pulling over for speeding subsequently occurs?
  6. Edit: Most illegal immigrantion does not occur via the border, but instead from people who flew in and did not leave when their visa expired, and it’s been that way for many years - thanks u/Coldbeam
  7. However, some people have been:
    1. Conflating the number of “encounters” at the border (even though most encounters are repeats with the same person being counted multiple times) with the actual number of immigrants.
    2. Conflating or falsely claiming that those legally following the asylum application process are an illegal or unauthorized immigrant.
    3. Pointing to the large number of times we caught/turned away people at the border and simultaneously trying to claim that the US has open borders and no enforcement, or using the broad term “immigrants” when they are really referring to “encounters” and include the same people counted multiple times, etc.
  8. The other record is the backlog of immigration court cases, partially or largely due to underfunding over quite a few years (and consequently the number of people legally in the US while they wait on their case). Properly funding immigration courts would go a long way to clearing the backlog, and then allowing those whose applications are rejected to be expelled, but Republicans have fought against this as they feel it’s better for them if there is a record backlog. Source.
  9. Each year the population of illegal immigrants can go up or down, such as from some arriving and others leaving. The number of illegal immigrants peaked around the end of George W. Bush’s presidency and the most recent number of illegal immigrants is lower - and again, these are absolute figures so as the US has grown over the decades, the illegal immigrant share of the population would be correspondingly lower https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/16/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
  10. Even including immigration, US population growth last year (0.49%) was around the lowest in the last one or two centuries. With a “rapidly aging” US population and slowing US birth rate, immigrants will be more important to keeping America going, including that the US birth rate has fallen to 1.7, “which is below the replacement rate of 2.1 that is required for the U.S. population not to shrink without increases in immigration.”
  11. The states with the highest rates of immigrants are California, New Jersey, New York.
  12. In just over 1 year, hundreds of thousands – more than 10% of the nation’s entire annual net immigrant total – was bused to or otherwise arrived in New York City which is the city with the highest density in the US, and one of the highest cost of living in the US, and which has a "unique right to shelter” law requiring the local government to provide shelter to those who don’t have it, including the hundreds of thousands who have been sent or arrived in NYC between 2022 and 2023. (In comparison, no city in Texas is even in the top 100 densest US cities.) Are people surprised that sending massive numbers of immigrants to areas that are already the most crowded in America, and with some of the highest housing costs in the US, would cause overcrowding?
  13. The state with the most illegal immigrants is California.
  14. Some have also raised concerns over immigrants bringing crime, but immigrants have lower crime rates than native-born Americans – more immigrants lowers crime rates.
  15. If interested as well, a map of which countries have the highest rates of immigrants - the US is #39 globally.
  16. The right’s focus on immigration is not something that has only been since the 2020 election; for example, Trump implied most immigrants were bad people and said he wanted to build a wall since his 2016 campaign.

If someone wants to say “Even though the actual number of immigrants to the US is far below what the US accommodated historically, after increasing border enforcement by many multiples we are catching/turning away more immigrants,” I would agree with that statement.

Do I think many, many aspects of the US needs to be re-analyzed in terms of “What can we learn from other successful developed nations”? Absolutely. But I think we too often get caught up in “That’s what makes America unique” even if objectively we see that many other countries achieved better outcomes for citizens by doing the opposite of the US.

I’ve tried to include source links above to many statistics, but if anyone has other specific immigration stats they found helpful, I’d love to see them; unfortunately too often in recent years it seems like the numbers in most discussions are just around “encounters” (or court backlogs, which again, properly funding would go a long way to solving).