President Trump’s campaign in 2016 and 2018 is all about bashing illegal immigrants and the policies of the administration have been consistent with his campaign rhetoric. He is not just lying to the American people about immigrants. He is damaging our long term economic growth.
His policies have been directed towards both legal and illegal immigration. For example, removing long term immigrants, restricting new legal refugees and asylum seekers, reducing the annual numbers of legal immigrants have all been targeted at restricting legal immigrants.
Illegal immigration is down about 30% from where it was in the 80’s and 90’s – about an 80% decline since the year 2000. https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/illegal-immigration-statistics/ Our nation’s population of illegal immigrants (about 10 million) has been declining due to better job opportunities and economic growth in Mexico and the fallout on low wage job opportunities from the Great Recession of 2008.
· Illegal immigrants have lower crime rates than native born US citizens, and so do legal immigrants. https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/03/us/immigrants-crime-numbers/index.html
· Illegal immigrants contribute far more in taxes than they use in public services. https://www.vox.com/2018/4/13/17229018/undocumented-immigrants-pay-taxes
· Illegal immigrants have a much higher rate of employment than US citizens. http://time.com/money/4268940/illegal-immigrants-work/
· Immigrants are a necessary ingredient to assure our economic growth; they counterbalance our aging citizen workforce and population. https://www.ced.org/reports/power-of-more-immigration Many of our competitors’ economic growth have been slowed by their aging populations of native citizens and their unwillingness to accept immigrants. Ours is being boosted; the percentages of highly educated immigrants to our nation is increasing while the percentages of less educated immigrants are declining.
Yes, we must have good and secure border controls, and we absolutely and urgently need to enact comprehensive immigration reform. We cannot get there from here while our President continuously lies to the American voters in his campaign efforts to get himself elected and to elect the like-minded.
Prepared by: Lucien Wulsin
Dated: November 3, 2018
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