Donald Trump had a relatively poor performance in Wednesday night’s CNN debate. But one of his stronger moments — at least from the point of view of his supporters — came when the topic of immigration arose.
“We’re going to have a country again,” he said in defending his ambitious (and probably unfeasible) plan to build a wall along the entire Mexican border and deport 11 million illegal immigrants. Each time Trump, who is number one in the Washington Examiner’s presidential power rankings, describes how hordes of foreigners are overrunning and destroying the country, he speaks to what many perceive as a major and underappreciated threat facing America.
But in reality, the problem over which Trump obsesses now ran its course long ago. Mass immigration was last decade’s big problem in the U.S., not today’s. It’s not just that immigration levels are lower today than they were in previous periods of greater peace and economic growth, such as the turn of the Twentieth Century. It’s also that mass illegal immigration just isn’t happening anymore, the recent influx of child migrants notwithstanding.
As the Pew Research Center has illustrated with data, illegal immigrants are also leaving the U.S. since 2007 faster than have been coming in. And there are fewer illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States today than there were in 2005.
Why? A major reason is that Mexico, the largest source of illegal immigrants to the U.S., became a better place to live. It shed its socialistic one-party political system in the late 1990s and adopted the very sort of free-trade policies that Trump now criticizes. Mexico signed free trade agreements with 44 different countries. Its exports increased six-fold. The share of Mexicans surviving on less than two dollars per day plunged from 20 percent in 1996 to just 4 percent in 2012.
Thus, the economic desperation that causes mass migration from Mexico has declined. Meanwhile, Mexico’s new crackdown on Central American immigrant traffic will likely lower the rate of illegal immigration to the U.S. even further.
This is not to say that immigration enforcement is a non-issue. For example, President Obama’s unilateral attempt to confer legal status on millions of illegal residents is a brazen, lawless challenge to America’s constitutional order.
Moreover, the idea of politically correct municipal governments protecting convicted criminals from deportation is something no reasonable person should accept. This is why the much-maligned establishment GOP leaders in Congress are set to pass a law against sanctuary city policies (it has already passed the House).
Yet even on that very legitimate issue of safety, the available evidence suggests a criminal immigrant problem that is much smaller than Trump’s rhetoric.
Take his own question, designed to cater to feminist hysteria: “Who is doing the raping?” In Texas, whose government tracks immigrant crime, legal and illegal immigrants together comprise about 16.5 percent of the population and (averaged over a four-year period) about 19 percent of those charged with rape and the other crimes that fall under the state’s definition of “sexual assault” in any given year.
Part of taking the immigration issue seriously involves talking about it. Trump has done that. But another part involves talking about it truthfully and offering realistic solutions. There, he continues to fail.
