By Jim Beard

Much of the rhetoric from Donald Trump and his supporters is framed to engender in Americans a sense of fear of immigrants. He has been at this from the beginning when in 2015 he said, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Little has changed in his statement from then until now as he speaks of immigrants as criminals and folks with mental problems that are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Any crime by an undocumented person in the U.S. is given great coverage and is suggested to be an indication of an immigrant crime wave. One case was the murder by a Venezuelan man of nursing student, Laken Riley. To listen to Trump and the right-wing media of this country we would be seeing visions of thousands upon thousands of undocumented immigrants wandering our streets with machetes and clubs out to steal our stuff and murder us. This narrative is simply not true.

Yes, the murder of Laken Riley was horrible, and the perpetrator should be punished but that incident is not an indicator of an immigrant crime wave. The fact of the matter is that if you find a group in the United States that numbers above say 100,000, I would suggest that you can find some serious criminals among them. That, however, does not make them a criminal group.

The data suggest some quite different. According to material from NPR, we find that immigrants are less likely to be involved in criminal activity than white citizens. They said, “Some of the most extensive research comes from Stanford University. Economist Ran Abramitzky found that since the 1960s, immigrants are 60 percent less likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born people.

“There is also state level research that shows similar results: researchers at the CATO Institute, a libertarian think tank, looked into Texas in 2019. They found that undocumented immigrants were 37.1 percent less likely to be convicted of a crime. The study also suggests that there is a real fear of getting in trouble and being deported within immigrant communities. Far from engaging in criminal activities, immigrants mostly do not want to rock the boat.” (NPR, March 8, 2024, All Things Considered, Jasmine Garsd)

It is pretty clear from all the research that I have found that the influx of immigrants is not a crime problem. So, what kind of problem is it? Trump and his allies call it a crisis. Crisis would suggest that it is a problem of highest magnitude, one that threatens our very existence. It is not that. We have an immigration problem, but not an immigration crisis.

The fact is that we need immigrants to bolster our workforce. Unemployment is very low, and employers have trouble finding workers. According to the Pew Research Center, between 2007 and 2022, the total U.S. workforce went from 153,300,000 to 171,100,000 during the same time the documented immigrant workforce went from 17,200,000 to 22,200,000. What is interesting is that the undocumented immigrant workforce stayed static at around 8,300,000.

Undocumented immigrants are not taking American jobs.

Here is the issue. The immigration problem is not the crisis Trump makes it out to be, but it is a problem worthy of serious attention. Presidents do what they can, but it an issue only Congress can solve. Congress keeps passing the buck and blaming the president for the problem.

There are a number of simple solutions which won’t work and will simply cause other problems.

The best a Harris administration can do for now is demand sufficient funding to have enough people to deal with the masses of people crossing the border and have enough immigration judges work on the backlog of cases. We are a rich country and can handle these desperate people. This is a problem that can only be solved by bipartisan efforts, but Trump and his allies don’t want to solve it, they want to use it as a political issue. Don’t let them.

Jim Beard lives in Albemarle currently, but lived in Rowan County for 32 years and was a professor of chemistry at Catawba College for 25 years and was very active in the Rowan County Democratic Party.