To former President Donald J. Trump and his running mate, the root cause of many of the issues in the United States is simple.
Be it gun violence, high housing costs, long wait times at emergency rooms or an impending depletion of disaster relief funding, Mr. Trump and Senator JD Vance have offered the same diagnosis: All are because of unauthorized immigration.
“The mass migration invasion has crushed wages, crashed school systems — your systems are a disaster — wrecked the standard of living and brought crime, drugs, misery and death,” Mr. Trump said at a rally in California over the weekend.
By casting migrants as agents of ruin and destruction, the Republican nominees are peddling a raft of specious claims that underline the extent to which nativist sentiment has become central to their campaign. But seldom is unauthorized immigration the actual cause of the problems they say plague the country.
Here’s a fact check.
Hospital wait times
What Was Said
This is misleading. Emergency room wait times have lengthened under the Biden administration. But that largely follows a yearslong trend with no evidence that immigrants are driving the increase. Moreover, emergency rooms prioritize patients for treatment based on severity of condition, not immigration status.
In fact, according to survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the median wait time to see a nurse or doctor in emergency rooms has steadily decreased over the past decade, from 21 minutes in 2014 to 11 minutes in 2020, but rose slightly to 16 minutes in 2021. (Emergency room visits overall declined in 2020 by over 40 percent as stay-at-home orders, the shift to telehealth appointments and changes in behavior altered patterns.) Conversely, the length of stay in emergency rooms has steadily climbed during that decade, from 109 minutes in 2014 to 192 minutes in 2022, according to industry survey data.
The broader issue of hospital overcrowding “has been a decades-long problem” that predates migration challenges under the Biden administration, said Dr. Arjun Venkatesh, a professor of emergency medicine at Yale University. He added that he had just attended a summit convened by the Health and Human Services Department on the topic — the third such summit in 20 years.
“Trends in emergency department use and wait times are complex, particularly coming out of a pandemic where thousands of health care workers were lost to Covid-19 and many more have been lost from the work force due to burnout,” said Dr. Paul Shafer, a professor of health care policy at Boston University.
“We have no conclusive evidence linking migration to emergency department crowding in the U.S.,” he added.
More relevant causes, Dr. Shafer and Dr. Venkatesh said, include an aging population, a decline in the number of hospitals and beds, staffing shortages across the health care system, poor access to and underinvestment in primary care and increased severity of patients showing up to emergency departments.
While some research shows that immigrants use emergency care for less urgent issues than nonimmigrants, given a lack of access to primary care, there is no consensus on whether they use emergency care more in general. Migrants may also be less likely to seek care because of language barriers, lack of referral or fear of immigration authorities.
As for Mr. Vance’s contention that migrants receive care ahead of Americans, a 1986 federal law forbids emergency room staff from inquiring about patients’ ability to pay or citizenship status as part of a hospital’s triage process. Rather, determining who is seen first involves evaluating a patient’s condition and vital signs, the reason for the visit and other information about the severity of the illness or injury.
The Trump campaign pointed to reports about hospitals that have experienced an influx of migrant patients in emergency rooms who could not afford to pay for care. Administrators at one hospital in Colorado said the financial burden had led it to turn away patients in the mental health and substance abuse units, while an Arizona hospital’s chief executive said the overcrowding has led to delays in planned inductions for other pregnant patients.
But those were examples of migrants needing emergency care leading to delays in nonemergency care for other patients. Dr. Venkatesh said he was not aware of any place where the triage process would put a migrant before a nonimmigrant based on citizenship alone. He pointed to a study he had worked on indicating that the opposite may be true: Those who jump the line are more likely to be white or insured than Black or Latino, and are also less likely to be uninsured or insured by Medicaid.
“We know there is some risk of disparities and bias in the triage process from research the other way, not in the direction of immigrants jumping the line,” he said.
Illegal guns
What Was Said
False. Asked about gun violence and school shootings during the vice-presidential debate in October, Mr. Vance again blamed border policies.
But the vast majority of illicit gun trafficking across the southern border is outbound, from the United States to Mexico, according to government data and experts. Inbound firearm trafficking, from Mexico to the United States, is minuscule in comparison and that has not changed under the Biden administration.
“Vance is not correct that there is an influx of illegal guns from Mexico, nor that it has increased. It is simply not a thing,” said Ieva Jusionyte, a professor at Brown University and the author of “Exit Wounds,” a book about firearms trafficking across the southwestern border.
Topher McDougal, a professor at the University of San Diego whose research focuses on the illicit small arms trade, noted that the United States is often called the world’s gun store, with more than 78,000 federally licensed arms dealers, pawnbrokers and manufacturers and more than 15 million legally sold firearms annually. In comparison, there are only two gun stores in all of Mexico.
“It is hard to believe that anyone would seek to go to Mexico and risk being caught by C.B.P. to source what is already cheaper and more readily available here. All incentives point the other way,” Mr. McDougal said, referring to Customs and Border Protection and noting that guns are often twice as expensive in Mexico.
Cartels often enlist the help of straw purchasers who can legally obtain firearms in the United States, and each makes multiple stops at various gun stores to amass an arsenal, said John Lindsay-Poland, an activist who coordinates the nonprofit Stop US Arms to Mexico.
“It’s very difficult on the U.S. side to catch before it gets to the border because in Texas and Arizona, it’s like, Oh, you’ve got three AKs or three AR-15s in your car? And two cases of ammo for a 50-caliber? Well, that’s legal,” he added. And evading detection at the border is not difficult, he added, given that controls primarily focus on what comes in.
As a result, the U.S. and Mexican governments and independent researchers have estimated that about 70 percent of firearms recovered at crime scenes in Mexico came from the United States, averaging 16,000 to 20,000 annually. And about 250,000 to 500,0000 guns are illegally trafficked from the United States to Mexico annually.
In comparison, out of some 1.9 million crime guns recovered and traced in the United States from 2017 to 2021, about 1.5 million were traced to a purchaser within the country, and 99 percent came from a federally licensed dealer, pawnbroker or manufacturer, according to a recent report from the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco and Explosives. Of some 150,000 firearms in trafficking cases investigated by the A.T.F. during that period, 72 percent traveled within the United States and 14 percent were smuggled from the United States to Mexico. Just 3 percent, or about 4,000 guns, were illegal imports into the United States and the vast majority of those, about 3,400, were guns from China.
Even data from Customs and Border Protection, which largely focuses on stemming illicit goods and unauthorized people entering the United States than leaving it, show a greater outbound flow. Of more than 6,500 weapons seized by officials at ports of entry along the southwest border since the 2021 fiscal year, about 3,000 were outbound and 755 were inbound. (The rest were seized between ports of entry, including abandoned caches, and with no indication of their destination.)
Serious crime
What Was Said
False. Mr. Trump frequently warns of “migrant crime,” citing individual cases in which the convicted or suspected perpetrator is an unauthorized migrant and warning that anyone could fall prey to such criminals. But the figures he cites do not refer to migrants who have entered over the past four years, nor have they been “set loose.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently released data on the number of migrants who had pending criminal charges or who were criminals on its docket for deportation. The data show about 227,000 people with pending charges and about 436,000 convicted criminals on the list, 13,000 of whom had been convicted of homicide and “nondetained.” But that term does not mean freely roaming, rather that they were simply not in that specific agency’s custody. Nor did these migrants all enter under the Biden-Harris administration.
A spokesman from the Department of Homeland Security said that the figure includes “individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this administration.” The spokesman also said that many were in local, state and federal prisons.
Reports from the federal government indeed show that there were almost 370,000 nondetained convicted criminals on the docket in August 2016 and more than 400,000 in June 2021 — indicating that the vast majority of those 436,000 criminals were on the docket before the Biden administration.
While it is unclear how many were currently behind bars, an October 2020 news release from the Justice Department under Mr. Trump estimated more than 900 migrants in federal prisons for committing serious crimes and more than 400 were in the custody of the United States Marshals for committing violent crimes. Immigration experts have noted that some have also served their full sentences and cannot be deported because they are from countries that would not accept deportees.
Long-term funding shortfalls for Social Security and disaster relief, and high housing prices
Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance have also blamed a host of other issues on migrants that The New York Times has previously fact-checked:
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Mr. Trump falsely claimed at the Nevada rally that “Kamala’s open border policy will destroy Medicare and Social Security for seniors because they’re stuffing them there.” (The opposite is true: Federal law prohibits unauthorized migrants from receiving Social Security benefits, but they do pay taxes that fund it and improve its financial health.)
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He falsely claimed during a Fox News interview that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has “no money” to aid victims of Hurricane Helene because it “spent it on illegal migrants coming into the country.” (The agency’s grants for migrant shelters is separate from disaster relief and equal to less than 1 percent of the agency’s budget.)
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He falsely claimed during the Fox News interview that migrants were “getting most of the jobs and the citizens aren’t getting the jobs.” (Official estimates of employment do not support this statement.)
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Mr. Vance hyperbolically claimed at a Detroit rally that “one of the biggest reasons why our young people can’t afford to buy a home is because under Kamala Harris’s leadership we have let in millions upon millions of people.” (A lack of supply is the primary culprit and deporting migrants could actually make the problem worse.)
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And Mr. Vance claimed in a September town hall that drug overdoses from fentanyl occur “because we have an administration that has let the Mexican drug cartels put this stuff in our country.” (Most drugs are smuggled in through legal ports of entry, and most people sentenced for drug trafficking are U.S. citizens.)
The post Trump’s Claims That Blame Migrants: False or Misleading appeared first on New York Times.
