Most people do not understand our current immigration issue. They have only heard the myths/lies propagated by right wing, xenophobic Republicans. Their rhetoric is wrong, refuted by experts who have taken the time to carefully research U.S. immigration.
My previous column on March 20th gave a backdrop to the current situation at the southern border. Most importantly, it’s nearly impossible to immigrate to the U.S. through the bureaucratic application process and there are insufficient resources to handle the number of immigrants seeking asylum. Seeking asylum is legal! The previous article disproved the three most common lies – those regarding drugs, crime and economic impact. This column refutes another six common immigration myths.
Voting
Myth: Undocumented immigrants are voting by the millions.
Facts: “These claims ignore the facts around noncitizen voting in federal elections, which is illegal and remains exceedingly rare even as it is thoroughly scrutinized”, according to Sean Morales-Doyle, director of voting rights at the Brennan Center for Justice. In the article “Trump suggests unauthorized migrants will vote. The idea stirs his base, but ignores reality” by Ali Swenson.
“In Georgia, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had his office perform a citizenship audit that found fewer than 2,000 suspected noncitizens registering to vote in the state over the past 25 years. None were actually able to cast a ballot.” Also in the NPR Morning Edition, “Conservatives are warning about noncitizens voting. It’s a myth with a long history,” Miles Parks wrote that Raffensperger said, “Noncitizens are not voting in Georgia.”
“The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of legal actions regarding election conduct found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023,” reported in “Four Things to Know about Noncitizen Voting” from the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Jobs/Wages
Myth: Immigrants will take American jobs, lower wages, and especially hurt the poor.
Facts: Pew Research by Jens Manuel Krogstad and co-authors indicates that a majority of Americans agree that immigrants, particularly undocumented immigrants, do not work in jobs that U.S. citizens want.
In NBER Working Paper 27778, Pierre Azoulay and co-authors conclude that immigrants actually create more jobs than they take. Immigrants start companies, both small and very large, at higher levels than native-born Americans.
Immigrants have an overall positive impact on the wages of American workers; among other factors, they have different skill levels and, with less English-speaking ability, they push native-English speakers to higher levels, writes Alex Nowrasteh of Cato in his book, “The Most Common Arguments Against Immigration and Why They’re Wrong.”
Citizenship
Myth: Providing a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients and other undocumented immigrants would hurt American workers and the economy.
Facts: “Putting undocumented immigrants on a pathway to citizenship would increase U.S. GDP by up to $1.7 trillion over the next decade, raise wages for all Americans, and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs, advancing the country’s economic recovery,” reported in “Citizenship for Undocumented Immigrants Would Boost U.S. Economic Growth” by the Center for American Progress.
“We are talking about people who, in the decade since DACA began, have graduated from college here, joined the labor force and the military, started families, enriched their communities and contributed more than $100 billion to the U.S. economy,” stated Rebecca Shi in Texas Impact, “Devastating Ruling for DACA Requires Unified Call for Congress to Act.”
Open Immigration Policy
Myth: The United States has the most open immigration policy in the world.
Facts: “The United States has not expanded its low green card caps since 1990, and now it ranks in the bottom third of wealthy countries for its foreign‐born share of the population,” says David J. Bier in “Policy Lags behind a Globalizing World.” Now at 15%, the percentage is similar to that of Spain, Norway, and Germany, with larger gaps between Canada (21%), New Zealand (28%), and Australia (30%) that equate to tens of millions of fewer U.S. immigrants.
Alex Nowrasteh states in his book that the annual inflow of immigrants as a percentage of our population, about .31%, is below that of most other rich countries; for example, the equivalent figure for Canada is .74% and Australia 1.1%.
Terrorism
Myth: Immigrants pose a unique risk today because of terrorism.
Facts: In written testimony to the Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement, Alex Nowrasteh states that during the 1975–2022 period, the number of people murdered or injured in attacks on U.S. soil committed by a foreign‐born terrorist who entered illegally across the U.S.-Mexico border or anywhere else was zero.
Supporting this in a post by independent, nonpartisan think tank Council on Foreign Relations’ Jacob Ware, “… there is scant evidence that illegal immigrants have committed acts of terrorism in the United States.”
Following Trump’s executive order suspending visas for nationals of Muslim countries, Andrew Lindsay of the Brennan Center for Justice concluded, “Empirical evidence demonstrates that Americans face more concrete threats from ‘homegrown extremism.’”
Assimilation
Myth: Today’s immigrants don’t assimilate as immigrants from previous eras did.
Facts: Leading immigration researchers Ran Abramitzky of Stanford and Leah Boustan of Princeton write in their book, “Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success”, how “Immigrants today move up the economic ladder at the same pace as they did 100 years ago. They also take active steps to adapt to U.S. society … at much the same pace as in the past.”
“Immigrants in the U.S. are, on average, the most assimilated in terms of language and educational attainment as they have been since at least the 1970s. By many measures, including English proficiency and wage growth, immigrants are assimilating faster and coming to the U.S. more ‘pre-assimilated’ than in past decades,” concludes Daniel Di Martino of the Manhattan Institute in “Accelerating ‘Americanization’: A Study of Immigration Assimilation.”
From his book Alex Nowrasteh concludes, “Immigrants to the United States—including Mexicans—are assimilating as well as or better than immigrant groups from Europe over a hundred years ago.”