MYTH: Immigrants augment crime rates
One of the most persistent political talking points among immigration opponents is that migrants bring crime with them to the United States
“When Mexico sends their people, they are not sending their best,” former President Donald Trump said on Twitter Campaign tour in 2016.
“Has anyone ever seen the movie ‘Gangs of New York?'” Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance asked during one Meeting with the Milwaukee Police Association in August. “We know that the formation of these vast ethnic enclaves in our country can sometimes lead to higher crime rates.”
In reality, the opposite is true. Immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens. Numerous studies show. One A study of incarceration rates over a period of more than 150 years — between 1870 and 2020 — found that U.S.-born citizens consistently end up in prison at higher rates than immigrants. And the gap between the two groups has only widened in recent years, with immigrants now 60% less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens, the nonpartisan said National Bureau of Economic Research.
Claims that immigrants have led to an augment in crime in the areas where they settle have also been proven wrong. Overall, criminal incidents, including violent crimes, have declined in cities across the country since peaking during the pandemic, FBI data shows. And while politicians claim that border cities are overwhelmed by lawlessness and chaos, the data shows that crime rates, including homicides, are very high lower than the national average.
Equating immigrants with criminals is tiring for Irayda Flores, a businesswoman from Phoenix, Arizona. Flores moved to the Grand Canyon State from Sonora, Mexico in 2004 in hopes of making her entrepreneurial dreams a reality. Since then, her wholesale seafood business, El Mar de Cortez Corp., has thrived, serving restaurants throughout the city and employing more than a dozen people. Yet despite the example they and other immigrants set, politicians continue to portray them as villains.
The rhetoric is the same every election year, she said, and it ignores the positive contributions of many immigrants who left their home countries to seek a better future.
“Politicians talk about the migrant community like they’re criminals, like they’re really terrible people,” Flores said. “But when migrants leave their country – their culture and the country in which they were born and raised – they do so because they are looking for opportunities. And in search of a new opportunity, they come here with the intention of working and moving forward.”
Dismissing all immigrants as criminals, she added, is harmful and unfair to the work many immigrants have done to make a difference in their host communities.
“You can’t generalize or treat an entire immigrant group as criminals because there are people who have lived in the country for decades and bring advantages with them,” Flores said. “They benefit the economy, they benefit their communities and they deserve to be treated with respect.”
MYTH: There is an invasion on the US-Mexico border
While the election campaign has seen politicians egging on voters about an “invasion” on the country’s southern border, the situation is more complicated. At the end of 2023, the number of migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border reached record highs. In December 2023, more than 300,000 encounters Conflicts between border officials and migrants broke out at the country’s southern border – an all-time high. Experts believe the augment is partly due to a global augment in migration patterns caused by economic stress during the pandemic.
In January 2024, the record number from December fell to around 176,000 encounters. The number eventually fell to a three-year low not seen since the pandemic. In August, the month for which the most recent data is available, the number of encounters rose slightly to 107,503 from 104,101 in July.
MYTH: Fentanyl is smuggled into the country by migrants
The border between the USA and Mexico extends almost its entire length 2,000 miles and includes 26 land ports of entry. U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers monitor both ports and the spaces in between. The majority of fentanyl is smuggled into the United States legally by citizens, reports the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. More than 90% of the banned fentanyl is seized by border officials at land ports of entry, according to DHS, and cartels primarily attempt to transport the drug across the border with the support of U.S. citizens. In fiscal year 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, 86.4% of fentanyl trafficking convictions were citizens.
MYTH: Immigrants apply public services
In most cases these are immigrants who are not citizens of the United States no entitlement to public benefits. Federal programs such as Section 8 Housing Aid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Medicaid, and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) are reserved exclusively for U.S. citizens.
Immigrants who are not citizens also cannot receive subsidies under the Affordable Care Act and they cannot apply for public health insurance coverage through the Marketplace.
However, those with legal indefinite residency status may be eligible for some public benefits after reaching the five-year residency period.
There are some federal protections to ensure migrants have access to medical care when they find themselves in life-threatening situations. Emergency Medicaid helps undocumented immigrants receive urgent medical treatment, and some services are available to immigrants through the Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.
Eligibility for state nonprofit programs varies across the country and can range from access to driver’s licenses to in-state tuition and scholarships.
MYTH: It’s effortless to get U.S. citizenship
Obtaining citizenship is a costly, multi-step and complicated process. And overburdened naturalization and asylum systems mean long waits for hopeful migrants.
Those seeking legal status through marriage must overcome a series of hurdles to verify the authenticity of the marriage, including regular interviews with immigration officials. Couples often spend hundreds or thousands of dollars and years on the application process.
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals grants protection from deportation and a momentary work permit to people without legal status brought to the country as minors, but recipients must meet strict criteria to qualify. This includes having lived in the United States since 2007, having arrived in the country before the age of 16, having no earnest criminal convictions, and either being currently enrolled in high school or having a diploma or GED.
DACA recipients accepted into the program must reapply for an extension every two years. And while recipients can apply for legal residency status if they are eligible through family or work-related immigration, the DACA program is currently frozen. Applications are still being accepted, but are not being processed, as there is still a legal dispute against the program that threatens to end the program entirely.
Asylum seekers must undergo a fear test by immigration officials to determine whether their concerns about persecution or threats to their lives justify granting them protection in the United States. New guidance from the Biden administration with the exception of considering asylum applications if there are a high number of encounters with migrants has made it more tough for people to apply for asylum.
Anyone hoping for a solution to their asylum or refugee case could wait years. There was an immigration backlog in 2019 increased to over 1 million casesa number that only doubled in the following years. As of September: The number of pending immigration cases over 3 million. The average time to complete a case is four years Syracuse University Transactional Records Access Clearinghousean organization that collects and analyzes federal immigration data.
MYTH: Immigrants don’t pay taxes
There are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States They all pay some form of taxes. A Analysis of the 2022 American Community Surveyan annual demographic survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, estimated that immigrants contributed $383 billion in federal taxes and $196 billion in state and local taxes. And while people without legal status cannot benefit from social security, the administration receives about 10% 13 billion dollars from the paychecks of workers without citizenship status.
Saúl Rascón moved to the USA with his family at the age of five. He became a DACA scholar in high school and has been employed ever since. Today he works with Aliento Votes, a pro-immigrant voter campaign. The allegations that immigrants do not pay their taxes annoy Rascón, who sees this as an opportunity to reduce the population’s contributions.
“It is particularly frustrating when immigrants are viewed as an economic deficit and detriment, even though it has been proven time and time again that this is not the case,” he said.
The problem, according to Rascón, is that the claim is credible to the average voter who doesn’t do any further research. And this claim is perilous for all immigrants, including himself, because it could provoke hostility towards the community as a whole.
The spread of disinformation about immigrants is harmful, he added, not only because it promotes anti-immigrant sentiment, but also because it makes it harder to find common ground when it comes to changing the country’s immigration system. While Republican politicians have focused on turning their base against immigrants, Democrats have moved to the right on the issue, placing increasing emphasis on enforcement policies to win as many votes as possible.
“We are no longer focusing our energy on our Dreamers and DACA, on undocumented people who were here, and on tax contributions,” Rascón said. “We have seen a shift toward border security that, while not unproductive, is not the best use of our time and resources.”
