Trump and Republicans Are Lying About Immigration and the Border
Busting the myths about Biden’s record on immigration.
Conventional wisdom hardened rapidly after Joe Biden took office as president: he had opened America’s southern border and triggered unprecedented levels of illegal immigration.
In early 2021, Republicans made “Biden’s border crisis” a heavy weapon. By 2024, it was a pillar of Donald Trump’s campaign to recapture the White House. Since Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris, many Democrats have accepted the Republican story and backed constitutionally dubious legislation empowering red-state governments and judges to seize control of immigration policy.
But the Republican story, says immigration expert David Bier, suffers one big problem: “This is untrue.”
It would surprise no one to hear that from Biden, defending himself as he limps toward an unhappy exit. But Bier – a former aide to a right-wing GOP congressman – is neither friend nor defender of the outgoing Democratic president. He directs immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
Facts, Not Feelings
Bier’s methodical deconstruction of what so many believe, won’t do Biden any good. But it’s an argument for heeding facts and not just feelings – even if the latter overpowers the former politically.
His first point?
The Biden-era spike in southern border crossings actually began under Trump. After plummeting during early COVID lockdowns, law enforcement encounters with migrants began climbing in May 2020. By December, apprehensions of single adult migrants exceeded levels in every December since 2005.
His second point: one of Trump’s emergency get-tough restrictions – "Title 42" – boomeranged to fuel the increase. While it allowed border agents to quickly turn back anyone crossing over from Mexico, it carried a price: Border authorities surrendered their ability to prosecute border crossers for illegal entry. Thus freed of legal jeopardy, migrants attempted to enter over and over at high rates. Many succeeded.
“Consequences were completely eliminated overnight,” Bier told me. “The Trump administration raised a green flag for all those people, [to try] without risking a felony prosecution.”
Other immigration experts agree. Title 42 “increased illegal border crossings instead of reducing them,” concluded a Penn-Wharton study.
The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, in an analysis last month, faulted Biden for having “almost immediately loosened immigration policy.” As a result, he wrote, “immigration quickly surged.”
He cited Biden’s halt to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy requiring asylum applicants to await adjudication of their claims there, his de-emphasis on the deportation of some applicants already here, and his stop to construction of Trump’s “border wall.”
But none of those, Bier explained, significantly affected border chaos.
Title 42 had already rendered Remain in Mexico ineffectual. The de-emphasis on deportation applied to few immigrants. Trump’s pet border wall was “completely useless” all along, Bier said, so abandoning it didn’t matter.
What, then, lifted the tide of politically damaging immigration? The red-hot economy jump-started by Biden’s $1.9-trillion COVID stimulus.
“The primary cause of increased immigration from 2021 to 2023 was the unprecedented labor demand in the United States,” Bier said.
In other words, the same hunger for workers that reduced unemployment and raised wages for Americans also attracted immigrants seeking a better life. Combined with new hardships in Latin American countries such as Venezuela and easy access to information about attempting entry to the US, it formed a powerful magnet.
Trying to temper Biden’s vulnerability during last year’s campaign, the White House and senators from both parties negotiated new border security legislation. Trump squelched it for political advantage. Biden then unilaterally restricted the legal process for migrants seeking asylum – a move courts blocked when Trump tried it.
Border crossings subsequently fell, bolstering arguments that the administration could have tempered the problem earlier. But Bier said the June executive action only marginally accelerated a decline underway since January, caused by cooling labor demand (the same cooling that led the Fed to cut interest rates).
Biden Is Not Blameless
There’s nothing unusual about presidents paying a political price for problems they didn’t create. It comes with the job.
Biden has paid more than most. Encouraged by Republicans, voters punished him for post-COVID inflation spikes that hit most developed countries.
Biden’s American Rescue Plan aggravated those spikes, but supply-chain problems associated with re-opening a shuttered economy caused them. “Without (the ARP), we’d still have had bad inflation,” Greg Ip, the Wall Street Journal’s chief economics commentator, wrote recently.
Republicans blamed Biden’s alleged soft-on-crime policies for higher murder rates. But a Brookings Institution study showed murders began rising under Trump during the COVID crisis – before the police killing of George Floyd triggered riots that he accused Democrats of encouraging.
Bier hardly holds Biden blameless. One mistake: trying to sidestep immigration woes by muting its public communications. Another: waiting until 2023 to end Trump’s counterproductive Title 42.
But he fears the second Trump presidency will be worse. Trump aides have reportedly signaled the incoming president hopes to restore Title 42, and curtail legal immigration the economy needs. Comprehensive reform of immigration law appears dead.
Though Republicans claim Biden’s immigration laxity lured criminals, Trump “released more convicted criminals into the US,” Bier found from government data. That’s because he sought broad-scale deportations rather than focusing narrowly on the relatively small number of immigrant criminals. His second term promises more of the same.
“I’m extraordinarily pessimistic,” Bier concluded.
Will Trump, master of immigration demagoguery, get blamed for what goes wrong? Don’t count on it.
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The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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Trump and Republicans lying? I am absolutely shocked, I tell you, shocked!
You could have cut the headline in half “ Trump and Republicans are LYING.