Jennifer Rubin: The Numbers Don't Lie, But Anti-Immigration Radicals Do Jennifer Rubin - The Washington Post
go to original December 27, 2016

America's Immigration Debate | Think Back (The New York Times)

Anti-immigration advocates, including Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), have long peddled in phony facts and misleading rhetoric to support their objection to both legal and illegal immigration. In essence, they’ve tried to construct an economic justification for their objection to non-white immigration. The arguments never held up; now the numbers tell us their economic rationale is baseless.

Some of their allegations are easily debunked. Immigrants are not “pouring” over the border. And President Obama dramatically increased the number of deportations:

Between 2009 and 2015 his administration has removed more than 2.5 million people through immigration orders, which doesn’t include the number of people who “self-deported” or were turned away and/or returned to their home country at the border by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). … The Obama administration has deported more people than any other president’s administration in history. In fact, they have deported more than the sum of all the presidents of the 20th century.

Contrary to President-elect Donald Trump’s rhetoric, the focus has been on violent criminals. (“In fiscal year 2015, 91 percent of people removed from inside the U.S. were previously convicted of a crime.”)

Moreover, more people are leaving the United States to cross the border to Mexico than are coming the other way. (According to the Pew Research Center: “From 2009 to 2014, 1 million Mexicans and their families (including U.S.-born children) left the U.S. for Mexico,according to data from the 2014 Mexican National Survey of Demographic Dynamics (ENADID). U.S. census data for the same period show an estimated 870,000 Mexican nationals left Mexico to come to the U.S., a smaller number than the flow of families from the U.S. to Mexico. … The decline in the number of Mexican immigrants residing in the U.S. has been mostly due to a drop of more than 1 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico from a peak of 6.9 million in 2007 to an estimated 5.6 million in 2014.”)

The notion that immigrants are “stealing” our jobs is belied by the near-full employment figures (4.6 percent unemployed) and a record number of job openings in the manufacturing sector. As a CNN report noted, this is symptomatic of “a growing problem in the U.S. economy, where employers can’t find skilled workers for the jobs that they need. That disparity is called the job skills gap, and it’s a major challenge in right now.” Demagogues find it easier to blame foreigners than to tell Americans that they need to retrain or relocate to where work can be found.

Read the rest at The Washington Post

Related: Houses of Worship Poised to Serve as Trump-Era Immigrant Sanctuaries (The New York Times)

Related: Alt-Right Snowflakes ‘Will Throw Massive Tantrum if Trump Isn’t Racist’ (Metro.co.uk)

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