[ad_1]
Aaron Blake
Senior political reporter, writing for The Fix
Watch the Washington Post live video on Twitch
President Trump is due to deliver his speech at 4:15 pm Thursday on the "crisis of immigration". This speech marks the latest escalation in a clearly concerted effort to organize the 2018 mid-term elections on the fear of undocumented immigrants.
Wednesday night, this effort culminated in the form of a racially-charged announcement at Willie Horton. Trump called the caravan heading to the southern border to be an "invasion" and sent thousands of soldiers to deal with it. He spoke of sending up to 15,000 soldiers – more than the members of the caravan – and of revoking (relatively unjustly) copyright citizenship through executive action.
The problem? Whatever definition you use for "crisis", the current situation on our border is struggling to cope.
Let's count the paths.
1. Illegal border crossings
Data from US Customs and Border Protection shows that the number of illegal crossings at the border has increased slightly in recent months and is higher than last year. The administration has repeatedly insisted on this fact, which would have been stimulated by Trump's anger at the situation.
But the number of arrests and people found to be ineligible during the past year – and even now – is not significant compared to the previous five years. This year is the red line:
Monthly arrests on the southwestern border. (US Customs and Border Protection)
Moreover, even the estimate of 50,000 monthly border apprehensions that we have seen in a few months this year is a fraction of where this number has been for most of this century. And the current number of annual apprehensions is also lower than ever since about 1970, according to FactCheck.org.
Apprehensions at the border by year. (FactCheck.org)
2. The number of undocumented immigrants
The figures above only concern people apprehended at the border. The logic is: what about those who are not apprehended? They are the ones who are most likely to reside illegally in the United States, after all.
Well, a combination of border apprehensions, deportations and people returning to their country of their own accord in recent years has actually meant that the number of undocumented immigrants in the United States has fall during the last years. The estimated number fell from 12.2 million in 2007 to 11.3 million in 2016, according to estimates. the Pew Research Center.
Number of undocumented immigrants per year. (Pew Research Center)
Some recent years have seen a slight increase, and we do not have data for 2017 and 2018 yet. But the above data on border apprehensions suggest that the number of undocumented immigrants living in the United States can not not much increase, if at all.
3. Recent immigrants
Not only has the number of undocumented immigrants gone down, but there are more and more newly arrived criminals that Trump cautions. According to Pew data, in 2014, only 14% of them had lived in the United States for less than five years.
In other words, the undocumented population is more and more a well-established population that, without legally living in the United States, is not the population that the Mexican and Central American governments are supposedly sent to perpetrate crime, rape and other ravages. Newcomers are down, both as a percentage of the undocumented population and in real numbers.
4. crime
Any undocumented immigrant, regardless of longevity, could of course commit such crimes. But the data suggests that they do not do it – at least not at the same pace as native-born Americans.
Although violent gangs such as MS-13 exist, the violent crime rate for undocumented immigrants is lower than that of the population as a whole, Christopher Ingraham from the post office, wrote.
Crime rate for undocumented immigrants, compared to legal immigrants and native-born Americans. (Screen capture)
The data also showed that crime rates were generally lower in places where the percentages of undocumented immigrants were highest.
5. The caravan
Agree, even if you put away ALL of the above, what about the caravan? Trump calls this an "invasion" of the United States for a while now. He even sent thousands of soldiers to the border, apparently to protect the homeland. No matter what preceded it, could not it be considered a "crisis?"
Well, there is very little reason for it to be an invasion, even if it aspired to be it.
The first problem is that these people have been traveling for weeks from Honduras; it would be very difficult for them to invade anyone. The second is that most of them will probably not even get that far, as such caravans tend to get lost in a long and arduous journey.
And the last reason is that this caravan, like the previous ones, is almost certainly designed not to immigrate illegally, but to ask for asylum. The last time we had one of these cases earlier this year, 1,500 people started the trip from southern Mexico, about 400 asylum applications and only 122 people were apprehended while They were trying to cross the border illegally.
This caravan is larger and may be different, but there is no reason to believe that these troops will really be needed to repel an "invasion".
[ad_2]Source link
