On Aug. 25, Donald Trump stood before the border wall at Montezuma Pass, Ariz., and claimed that he had built it. This segment was, in fact, finished at the end of 2008 just as President George W. Bush was leaving office.
Standing next to Trump, a border patrol officer commented that a pile of construction material at the end of the structure was “Kamala’s wall.” This part, however, was left unfinished because of a lack of funds during the Trump administration.
The border wall has been the most expensive public works project since the building of the Interstate Highway System. It has been breached thousands of times either by sawing through it, digging under it, or climbing over it. In March 2021, 44 migrants drove an SUV through a gap in the wall near Calexico.
The supreme irony of border walls is that they always dare people to breach them. Sophisticated surveillance technology would be less expensive and more effective. An article in Mother Jones (Sept.-Oct., 2023) covers both the effectiveness of spotting those crossing the border but also the real dangers for human rights abuse.
At the end of September 2024, Trump claimed the Biden administration let loose more than 13,000 migrant murderers, but he didn’t mention that they had already served their sentences. This is a figure that goes back 40 years, so this is 327 homicides per year.
A National Institute of Justice study found that “undocumented immigrants are arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes.” In 2022, according to the FBI, there were 6,629 murderers who were white.
Most immigrants who have committed crimes are deported after leaving prison, but some, as explained by a reporter from the Washington Post, have, “pending immigration cases and have received permission to remain in the U.S. while their claims are resolved.” There are also a small number whose countries of origin refuse to take them back.
Responding to Trump’s accusations, the White House reported that it has “prioritized the deportation of those who’ve committed violent crimes and have, in fact, deported them at a 50 percent higher rate than under former president Trump.”
The Biden administration has now created 16 million jobs in nearly four years, far exceeding Bill Clinton’s record of 18.6 million over eight years. This is nothing new. Since World War II, Democratic administrations have outperformed Republican governments in job creation by a factor of 3.
But now Trump, showing his superb math skills on C-Span, said that “jobs in the Biden administration in the past year — 100% of available jobs — have gone to migrants. It’s substantially a much higher number than that.”
Economists predicted that there would be 140,000 new jobs in August, but there were 254,000 instead. On Oct. 5, JD Vance absurdly insisted that they all went to undocumented immigrants.
University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers was quick to reply: “Senator, I don’t want to get caught up on facts, but the share of American-born folks in their prime working years who have jobs is higher than at any point during the Trump administration.”
In the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate, Vance blamed illegal immigrants for high housing costs. Economists were quick to debunk this claim. One Dany Bahar at Brown University countered: “They are not competing for the same households as middle-class Americans.” I would add that they are renting not buying homes.
Returning to the border a major clarification is in order. Vice President Kamala Harris was not appointed “Border Czar,” rather she was put in charge of stopping Central Americas from coming to the border. In April 2021, the Biden-Harris administration restored funds to an immigration reduction program that the Trump administration had unwisely cancelled.
The program was rechristened the “five-pillar strategy,” which has matched federal funds with private monies from companies and organizations for investment in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras — commonly known as the Northern Triangle. Over three years $5.2 billion has been poured into social and economic development and Kamala Harris has been leading the efforts there.
The results have been impressive. Jason Marczak of the Atlantic Council reports that the portion of migrants from the Northern Triangle “has dropped from 49 percent in March 2021 to 18 percent in June 2024.”
I suggest falsely claiming that migrants are the cause of all our problems is fear mongering plain and simple.
Gier is professor emeritus at the University of Idaho. Email him at ngier006@gmail.com.
