WE SHOULDN'T LET TRUMP'S IMMIGRATION VIEWPOINT BE AMERICA'S DEFAULT

President Trump went on an anti-immigrant tirade yesterday, as AP reports:

President Donald Trump says he wants to “permanently pause migration” from poorer nations and is promising to seek to expel millions of immigrants from the United States by revoking their legal status. He is blaming immigrants for problems from crime to housing shortages as part of “social dysfunction” in America and demanding “REVERSE MIGRATION.”

His most severe social media post against immigration since returning to the Oval Office in January came after the shooting Wednesday of two National Guard members who were patrolling the streets of the nation’s capital under his orders.

Trump's Truth Social posts were full of falsehoods -- I'd call them "lies," but I'm certain that Trump believes every word he wrote. AP tries to debunk some of the untruths.

The president said on Truth Social that “most” foreign-born U.S. residents “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels” as he blamed them for crime across the country that is predominantly committed by U.S. citizens.

There are roughly 50 million foreign-born residents in the U.S., and multiple studies have found that immigrants are generally less likely to commit crimes than are people who were born in the country.

The perception that immigration breeds crime “continues to falter under the weight of the evidence,” according to a review of academic literature last year in the Annual Review of Criminology.

“With few exceptions, studies conducted at both the aggregate and individual levels demonstrate that high concentrations of immigrants are not associated with increased levels of crime and delinquency across neighborhoods and cities in the United States,” it said.

A Census Bureau report issued late last year and based on 2023 figures says that the majority of foreign-born residents are naturalized citizens.

And despite Trump's obsessive invocation of Joe Biden in one of his Truth Social posts and elsewhere in his public statements -- he vowed to "terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen" -- the Census Bureau notes that most of the immigrants in this country came here long before the presidencies of Biden and Trump:

Among immigrants, 15.2% have graduate or professional degrees -- a higher percentage than in the general U.S. population. This includes 325,000 foreign-born doctors. Among immigrants aged 16 and older, 63.7% are in the workforce, the Census Bureau says; the civilian labor force participation rate for Americans overall is 62.4%.

In the second of Trump's anti-immigrant rants last night on Truth Social, he asserted that

hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone.

I recently returned from a trip to Minneapolis and other parts of Minnesota, and I can assure you that this is not the case. And I'm sure I don't need to tell you that Trump's numbers are wrong: there are an estimated 80,000 Somalis in Minnesota, not "hundreds of thousands," which means they're slightly more than 1% of the state's population of approximately 5.8 million.

All this is accompanied by the usually fact-challenged nonsense portraying immigrants and refugees as parasites:

A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher. This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America....

It doesn't seem to matter how many times fact-checkers debunk claims of massive payouts to immigrants -- the haters just keep returning to this talking point.

Obviously, we'll never persuade committed Republican voters that immigrants aren't leeches. But there are pepople in the middle who don't seem certain what to think about immigrants but apparently default to the belief that immigrants are takers.

I think that helps explain the results that show up in poll after poll, like a recent national survey from Marquette University. When asked, "Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries?," 58% of respondents favored deportation, while 42% were opposed. But when they were asked in a follow-up, "Do you favor or oppose deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries even if they have lived here for a number of years, have jobs and no criminal record?," support for deportation dropped to 44% and opposition rose to 56%.

That tells me that many Americans believe that the typical immigrant who's in the country illegal isn't working, isn't contributing, isn't trying to be a responsible individual -- and that seems to be because the loudest voices create that impression of undocumented immigrants and foreign-born people in America in general. I don't know how we turn that around, but if we could find a way, it seems that a majority of Americans would reject Trump's sinister view of the foreign-born.