What you know about our “open” border is completely wrong.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

That quote is widely known to come from Mark Twain. But he may not be the author. Ironically, his ownership is one of the many things some people know for sure that quite possibly ain’t so.

This blog is at mythfighter.com because it aims to dispel claims most people know that just ain’t so.

Regular readers recognize some of these “just ain’t so” beliefs:

1. For our Monetarily Sovereign government, continuing to run federal deficits is unsustainable.
2. The federal government’s finances are similar to personal finances.
3. The government should have a balanced budget.
4. “Excessive” federal spending causes inflation.
5. The solution to inflation is to raise interest rates, cut spending, and/or increase taxes.
6. The federal government spends taxpayers’ money.
7. Social Security and Medicare benefits are paid for by trust accounts.
8. Social Security and Medicare will run short of money without benefit cuts or tax increases.

You’ve read and heard these beliefs perhaps for your entire life. You may believe them ardently. You and your friends may discuss them frequently. No one doubts them.

Yet, they are wrong. Not even one of them is true.

And I’m not talking about slightly wrong, or wrong because of some technicality. They all are fundamentally wrong, diametrically wrong. Wrong in every way that something can be wrong.

Look through this blog to see the proofs of how wrong those beliefs are.

Today’s blog discusses yet another set of wrong beliefs I’ve seldom touched on. Until now. They have to do with immigration.

The false beliefs begin with this chart, which few people would have predicted.

The alarmist rhetoric, mainly from the Republicans, may have made you believe that America is swamped with undocumented immigrants, especially since President Biden took over in 2021.

But, according to Britannica ProOrg, the percentage of undocumented immigrants vs. total population has hardly budged in many years:

Percentage of US population
undocumented immigrants

2022 3.5%;  2021 3.1%;  2020 ?*;
2019 3.5%;  2018 3.5%;  2017 3.5%;
2016 3.3%;  2015 3.4%;  2014 3.5%;
2013 3.6%;  2012 3.6%;  2011 3.7%;
2010 3.8%;  2009 3.5%;  2008 3.8%;
2007 3.9%;  2006 3.9%;  2005 3.5%
*Unable to calculate estimate due to COVID-19 pandemic complications with the 2020 census.

Here’s what a population expert has found:

How Migration Really Works review: Prepare to have your mind changed
Hein de Haas’s decades-long study of global migration should leave you rethinking what you thought you knew about this most divisive subject. by Simon Ings, 8 November 2023

Everyone who starts geographer Hein de Haas’s How Migration Really Works will have opinions about migration – few will finish with their preconceptions intact.

Drawing on three decades of research from his time at the University of Oxford and the University of Amsterdam, de Haas shows that everything we know about migration is wrong.

This isn’t because migration is an especially complex matter but because economic and political interests, on both the left and the right, have lost sight of the evidence – that is when they haven’t actively misrepresented it.

De Haas explores trends in global migration patterns, examines the impacts of migration on both destination and origin societies, and closes with a series of fairly devastating takedowns of popular ideas.

The problem runs deep. Take the frequently quoted figures released by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which “seem” to show that the global total of displaced people increased nearly 50-fold from 1.8 million in 1951 to 100 million in 2022.

What explains this shocking rise? Globalisation? War? Climate change? Issues with the statistics?

“What appears to be an unprecedented increase in refugee numbers,” de Haas explains, “is, in reality, a statistical artifact caused by the inclusion of populations and countries previously excluded from displacement statistics.”

UNHCR’s current figures are now truly global. But, its 1951 baseline figure was drawn from a database covering just 21 countries.

It is the direction of migration after the second world war that some in Western nations have found so disconcerting. The numbers have hardly changed.

At any time, around 3 percent of the world’s population are migrants. A tenth of those are refugees.

The figure for unsolicited border crossings (de Haas refuses to use the term “illegal crossings,” as it doesn’t capture the legal position outlined in the UN Refugee Convention) fluctuates erratically, depending on labor demand in destination countries and conflict in origin countries, but the underlying number remains stubbornly consistent.

People go where jobs are available, and they flee turmoil. In short, people come to where they can work, contribute to an economy, and raise their children safely.

They are not troublemakers. Quite the opposite. Immigrants are less likely to break the law than are citizens.

This graph shows results in Texas

If migration levels are stable, historically, why all the emotion?

De Haas pulls no punches: “Although they may advocate very different solutions, politicians from left to right, climate activist and nativist groups, humanitarian NGOs and refugee organizations and media have all bought into the idea that the current era is one of a migration crisis.”

That this results in staggeringly wrong-headed policy-making comes as no surprise – witnessed massive US investment in border enforcement since the late 1980s.

This writes de Haas, has “turned a largely circular flow of Mexican workers going back and forth to California and Texas into an 11-million-strong population of permanently settled families living all across the United States”. They stay because it is too costly in every sense to keep moving.

Think about it. Strong borders keep undocumented immigrants from returning home. They fear they will not be able to return — a classic example of a law accomplishing exactly the opposite of its stated intention.

Catastrophizing migration also has a cultural impact. In host nations, nightmare migration scenarios are peddled to tickle every political palate.

An international cabal runs people smuggling. (No evidence.) The mafia are trafficking young women for sex. (No evidence.) Migration flows mainly from the poorer southern hemisphere to the wealthy north. (Wrong.)

Migration lifts all boats. (No. It overwhelmingly benefits the already affluent.) Where is the scenario that credits migrants themselves with connections, ambitions, foresight, agency, or even intelligence?

Politicians, especially on the right, describe migrants in the most negative terms as a criminal hoard invading America and planning to destroy our nation.

The facts are quite the opposite:

The Secure Communities Program is pitched as a way to deport criminals before they can commit more crimes in the United States

But at least two independent studies suggest Secure Communities didn’t affect crime rates, according to  UW–Madison sociology professor Michael Light , despite deporting more than 200,000 people in its first four years.

“If the plan was to make communities safer, to reduce the likelihood of, say, a felony violent assault in these communities through deportation, it did not deliver on that promise,” Light says.

“Our results help us understand why that is. The population of people we deported simply was not a unique criminal risk. Removing them isn’t going to make you all that safer.”

While the new study can’t describe why undocumented immigrants commit fewer crimes, it’s a common finding that first generation immigrants tend to be less crime-prone — and undocumented immigrants are, almost by definition, first-generation immigrants.

(“Illegal immigrants are 44 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives. Legal immigrants are 69 percent less likely to be incarcerated than natives. Legal and illegal immigrants are underrepresented in the incarcerated population while natives are overrepresented.” The Cato Institute)

Light believes there are many reasons to expect a lower crime rate among undocumented immigrants.

“They have a tremendous incentive to avoid criminal wrongdoing.

The greatest fear among undocumented immigrants is getting in legal trouble that leads to deportation,” says Light, whose work is supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Justice.

Another factor at work may be that immigration, especially illegal entry into the U.S., is not easy. It attracts people with particular motives. 

“There’s lots of opportunity to commit crimes in Mexico and Venezuela and other places people are emigrating from,” Light says.

“The argument is that many people who want to immigrate are selected on attributes like ambition to achieve, to find economic opportunities, and those types of things aren’t very highly correlated with having a criminal propensity.”

Criminals are people who have less fear of the law than do those who resist any impulse to commit a crime.

The traitors who invaded the Capitol on January 6, and tried to destroy America’s democracy, did not fear the law. They believed they would not be arrested and were confident they would not be deported.

They were not undocumented immigrants. They were home-grown from right wing MAGA extremist groups like the Oath Keepers, Proud Boys, and Three Percenters.

How Migration Really Works is a carefully evidenced critique of a political culture that would rather use migration as a domestic passion-play than treat it as an ordinary and governable part of civil life.

To be pro and anti immigration is to miss the point entirely. You wouldn’t ask an economist whether they are for or against the economy, would you?

We are constantly told we need “a big conversation” about immigration. I am rereading this book (something crabbed reviewers never normally do).

Until I am done, I am going to keep my big mouth shut.

Simon Ings is a critic and writer based in London

SUMMARY

As of this date, the book is not yet available to the public, but several things are clear.

1. Far from being a threat, immigrants are an asset to America, as they always have been. Part of America’s strength comes from immigrants, the world’s most motivated people.
   By accepting immigrants, we receive those who are motivated to pull up roots in order to make better lives for themselves and their families, and in doing so, improve the nation that gives them refuge and opportunity.
   In short, immigrants to America are the best their former nations have to offer.
2. Immigrants are less likely to be lawbreakers than are citizens.
3. America needs the immigrant workforce, especially for seasonal work or for jobs citizens don’t want.
4. The anti-immigrant rhetoric is based on bigoted, Trumpian fearmongering, not on facts.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty
Facebook: Rodger Malcolm Mitchell

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The Sole Purpose of Government Is to Improve and Protect the Lives of the People.

MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY