Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump will speak to the American people about his demands for a southern border wall, which have led him to shut…
Tuesday evening, President Donald Trump will speak to the American people about his demands for a southern border wall, which have led him to shut down the government. He will, undoubtedly, gin up fear about a “crisis” mounting at the US-Mexico border. Here are nine things you should know in advance of his speech — incidentally, nine things that I wish Trump would correctly acknowledge in his speech, too.
After all, Trump has been hyping fears about violence stemming from the United States/Mexico border since the early moments of his presidential campaign. In June 2015, for instance, he painted an ugly picture of Mexican migrants crossing the border. “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists,” Trump said. He has kept up his fearmongering about the border, but ramped it up in recent weeks as justification for his sudden decision to shutdown the federal government because neither Democrats nor Republicans in his own party will approve funding for Trump’s border wall. He has tweeted about “our VERY DANGEROUS SOUTHERN BORDER” and even threatened to declare a state of emergency to build the wall that he insists is not only needed but is also needed now more than ever.
Trump is simply, on these and related points, incorrect. Here are the key facts:
Read more commentary: Trump’s ‘border security’ shutdown: Cut off cash to people and agencies that protect us
Trump turned the border wall into his Alamo. That didn’t end well and this won’t either.
Stories from the border: The women asylum seekers I met need protection, not barriers
► Illegal border crossings are down. Significantly.
In 2000,1.6 million people were apprehended trying to cross the southern border into the United States. In 2001,1.3 million were apprehended. In 2018? Less than 400,000. That’s not just a decline. It’s a significant decline.
A lot of the decline was because of the recession, which dried up jobs migrants were seeking to fill. But if we’re being fair, apprehension numbers reached a low of about 310,000 in 2017 in part because of increased border enforcement and fear of Trump and his anti-immigrant policies.
► The counties along the southern border are among the safest in the United States.
According to data from the Wilson Center, as summarized by The Washington Post, “The crime rates in U. S. border counties are lower than the average for similarly sized inland counties, with two exceptions out of 23 total.”
Anti-immigrant conservatives like to talk about how undocumented immigrants are supposedly menacing border communities and making border states less safe. Recently, in a segment with me on CNN, conservative radio host and Trump supporter Ben Ferguson shouted, “Talk to people in Texas! I’m in Texas right now! People here… have been killed by illegal immigrants that come across the border illegally. And you say it’s fearmongering!?”
Yes, I do. And I’m not the only one.
