14 OCT 2021

Debunking Right-wing Myths About the Southern Border

Immigration Hub is exposing some of the most egregious and pervasive myths about immigration perpetuated by Republican and right-wing actors. Today, we wrap up our series by debunking two myths about the southern border.

Washington, DC — MYTH: Trump did a better job securing the border and managing immigration, and Biden has made it worse. Elected Republican officials are blaming the Biden Administration and providing cover for themselves and their party whose policies have failed. 

  • @AdamLaxalt: Biden “inherited” a safe and secure national border. Under Trump, border crossings and human and drug trafficking were at all-time lows. Now, we have a disaster at our border thanks to the #BidenBorderCrisis

  • .@CawthornforNC: Joe and Kamala are responsible for the crisis at the Southern Border, NOT Trump, NOT Republicans, and NOT the Border Patrol. Playing the blame game is what the Left does best.
     

FACT: Trump and Republicans worsened an already broken immigration system, caused chaos at the border, and continue to weaponize the issue. In an attempt to deflect responsibility and shift blame, Republicans are rewriting the story to suit their needs. In fact, Trump’s policies, Republican obstruction on immigration solutions, and Republican gubernatorial freelancing has worsened an already broken system.

  • Trump policies were not just cruel, they were also ineffective. The Trump Administration separated families without any plans to reunite them, gutted the (entirely legal) asylum process, diverted critical funds to build a vanity wall, defunded crucial programs to address the root causes of migration in the Northern Triangle countries, issued the harmful Remain in Mexico policy, dismissed the recommendations of an internal government watchdog group, allowing CBP and ICE to run rogue, and instituted over 1,000 draconian policies that debilitated an already outdated immigration system. Yet these inhumane, deterrence-based policies failed to address the reasons families and children sought safety and asylum at the border, creating further dangerous conditions across the Mexico-US border as migration continued. 

  • Republican Governors on the border are instituting policies that do more harm than good. Nowhere is this more clear than Texas Governor Abbott’s policies, which are more political theater for a nativist base than they are good policy. While banning vaccine mandates, shunning masks, and putting Texans’ health at risk, Abbott is, in turn, blaming migrants for the spread of COVID-19 and issuing executive orders that directly target immigrants across his state. Support organizations and community leaders at the border disagree with his approach, including some of the largest border counties (Hidalgo, Cameron, Willacy and Starr). Instead of working with the federal government to create a safe, orderly and humane system, Governor Abbott has filed five lawsuits and stood in the way of progress at every turn.
     

MYTH 2: Record numbers of immigrants are illegally invading our southern border. Republican elected officials, Party leadership and committee social media accounts are playing with the numbers and pushing a misleading, alarmist narrative to politicize the border: 

  • @chiproytx: THIS. IS. AN. INVASION.  Cartels are pushing people and narcotics for profit and it is harming Americans.  @JoeBiden impeachably refuses to do anything about it.  States must act - and must not seek approval in the courts… just secure the border.  #SecureBorderNow

  • @StephenM: We have a wide open border, deadly drugs and contraband streaming through unimpeded, record-smashing numbers of illegal migrants, catastrophic overcrowding in the heart of a pandemic, and Team Biden’s response is to…ban horses.
     

FACT: The arrival of migrants at our southern border is impacted by political crises and catastrophic events, including political violence, natural disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic that destabilized economies and countries. 

  • COVID-19 further destabilized regions already grappling with disasters, extreme poverty and violence and disrupted migration patterns.  Migrants who delayed coming to the U.S. in 2020 hastened the journey in 2021. The Washington Post reported that the increase in arrivals in 2021 is due to a backlog of migrants who would have come earlier if not for the COVID-19 pandemic which effectively closed the border.
    Additional events, such as political instability and natural disasters in Haiti, have also caused certain populations to leave their homes to seek safety and refuge in the United States and other countries.

  • Border numbers often appear inflated by the inclusion of migrants counted multiple times as they attempt re-entry. The Trump-era use of Title 42 has actually encouraged single adults to attempt crossing the Southern border repeatedly. As Vox has reported, “Before the pandemic, they might have been dissuaded from trying again for fear of facing criminal prosecution for illegal entry and disqualifying themselves from legal migration pathways, such as asylum. But under the pandemic-era process, they are merely fingerprinted, processed, and dropped off in Mexico without consequence.” CBP data cited by Vox shows that it has increased the recidivism rate from 7% in 2019 to 40 percent.

  • Unlawful entry into the United States has actually declined since reaching its peak in 2000. Massive spending on border security has led to a higher number of apprehensions. This does not mean that more people are crossing the border, but rather that more people are being prevented from doing so.  In fact, while apprehension numbers have increased over the past 15 years, unlawful entries have declined drastically. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council estimates this decrease by five times less  given the current apprehension rate at 75% versus 37.5% in 2006. It should be noted that this spending to militarize the southern border has also led to serious repercussions for border communities including civil rights violations and other abuses carried out by an agency that lacks proper oversight and accountability . 

  • Immigration is legal, and the vast majority of migrants have come to ports of entry at the border to apply for asylum. This is entirely legal and has been a fundamental part of our immigration system. The Biden Administration is working to manage these applications in a new, orderly and humane way, unlike the chaos Trump created. In fact, America’s asylum process reflects our founding values, and has long existed. 


Bottom line: Republicans continue to play politics at the border, but their record on immigration is clear: oppose, obstruct, blame, and divide. Instead of working towards immigration solutions that the majority of Americans support, they have only endorsed ineffective and cruel policies, from a wasteful vanity wall to turning away families and children in need of asylum. Republicans are not interested in bipartisanship or delivering on citizenship; their political strategy focuses on mobilizing voters through fear with no regard for the humanity, dignity, and safety of migrants.
 

Other debunked myths include racist scapegoating of immigrants for the spread of COVID-19, baseless claims that immigration hurts the American economy, and propaganda about immigrants and crime.”

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The Immigration Hub is a national organization dedicated to advancing fair and just immigration policies through strategic leadership, innovative communications strategies, legislative advocacy and collaborative partnerships.