By Jim Bloch
It’s not surprising that Donald Trump told a number of lies and made a number of misleading statements about immigration in his Sept. 10 debate with Kamala Harris.
The fact checking team at the Washington Post found that Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his four years as president, an average of 21 per day. He made 492 in his first 100 days in office and the pace of his lying accelerated during his tenure. On Nov. 2, 2020 alone, the day before the election, he made 503 such statements. He became, the Post said, “increasing unmoored from the truth.”
In his debate against Kamala Harris, Trump said “we have millions of people pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums” – a lie, according to PolitiFact, a nonpartisan fact checking group. “You look at Springfield, Ohio. You look at Aurora in Colorado. They are taking over the towns. They’re taking over buildings.”
Trump began his lie about immigrants the minute he announced his presidency in 2016 at Trump Tower: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” He has not changed.
Immigrants are well educated
Trump in his rants about immigration implies that immigrants are uneducated and animal-like, unable to control their impulses.
“In education, never before have such a large proportion of immigrants in the US been so highly skilled and educated,” said Nancy Foner, professor of sociology at CUNY Hunter College, in a presentation July 16 to SciLine, the scientifically-grounded reporting resource for journalists. “Again, some figures. In 2022, 35% of immigrants over 25 had a bachelor’s degree or more, and that was almost exactly the same as US-born adults. For them, it was 36%.”
Some immigrant groups are extremely well educated.
Eighty percent of adult Indian immigrants have at least a bachelor’s degree, she said.
Sixty-five percent of Nigerian adult immigrants to the U.S. have at least a B.A. – an interesting figure given Trump’s reference in 2018 to “shit hole countries,” which included Haiti, El Salvador and African countries, of which Nigeria is one.
Adult immigrants from China and Korea have bachelor degrees at a 50 percent rate.
As a side note, the new waves of immigrants settle everywhere – in suburbs, small towns, the Deep South, the Far West, not just in urban enclaves such as Chinatown in New York City.
The new melting pot?
Trump’s claims that immigrants are taking control of whole cities suggest that they have no desire to Americanize themselves, to become acculturated and learn English.
That’s not what the data tell us.
“And what’s clear is that in educational attainment, in income, and occupational distribution, living above the poverty line, residential integration, and English language ability, immigrants and their children are becoming more like the native-born over time,” said Foner. “Those who come without English are acquiring English as rapidly, and actually, some studies show even faster, than European immigrants did in the early 20th century. And by the third generation, that’s the grandchildren of immigrants, the third generation is, to a large extent, monolingual in English, leading some social scientists to actually say that the U.S. is the graveyard of languages.”
Immigrants have made the U.S. better
The contributions of immigrants to contemporary American society are dramatic and numerous.
Immigrants have revived towns and cities that had been losing population and experiencing the resulting urban decay, including towns like Springfield and Aurora.
There are a number of “cases of deteriorating urban neighborhoods that have been saved by immigrants moving in,” said Foner. She cited her neighborhood in Brighton Beach in New York, repopulated and revived by immigrants from the former Soviet Union, a Little Village in Chicago, revitalized by Mexican immigrants.
If the flow of immigrants into the U.S. is stopped, as Trump advocates, and millions of undocumented immigrants are deported, communities that have been revitalized by them will slide back toward ghost-town status and the economy will shrink.
On the culinary front, the impact of immigrants has been a delicious one.
“There are many ways that immigrants have added to our culture — new foods, tastes, dishes,” said Foner. “I like to say that there are more Chinese restaurants in New York than in the U.S. There are more Chinese restaurants … in the U.S. than all the McDonald’s, Burger Kings and Kentucky Fried Chickens combined. (And) salsa sells has higher sales than ketchup.”
American carnage?
Just as he did in his inauguration speech of 2017, Trump paints a picture of “American carnage,” the country as a crime-ridden failed state in which a flood of immigrants have stolen American jobs and wrecked the economy.
If the country was that bad as he says, people would not want to come here.
“Hey, if people want to come to your country, that is a good problem to have,” said Dr. Pia Orrenius, a labor economist serving as vice president and senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank at Dallas, who participated with Foner in the SciLine conversation.
Orrenius said that the U.S. can find the immigration reforms necessary to work in the interests of the national economy as a whole, American workers and immigrants themselves.
“We can make it work,” she said. “We can figure it out… Just think of what it’s like to live in a country where nobody wants to come to your country. I mean … that’s a terrible problem.”
Jim Bloch is a freelance writer based in St. Clair, Michigan. Contact him at bloch.jim@gmail.com.
