Shifting tactics after losing contracts with nearly a dozen different companies GOP Presidential hopeful Donald Trump is now arguing that he didn't mean to insult Mexicans when he said ...
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. 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.”
But rather than insulting immigrants, he says he was criticizing the Mexican
Government and that the media has been grossly dishonest
when reporting his words.
Trump insisted that the media has taken his comments about Mexican immigrants out of context because the press "in many cases is very, very dishonest."
"I have great respect for the country of Mexico," he said, adding "They're sending people into our country that we don't want but we take and that they don't want. And you know who they're sending."
I would tend to agree that the media has grossly failed to do a good and thorough job at reporting about Immigration, for example hardly anyone in the mainstream media has noted that Trump's oft mentioned source for this "Rapist" comment was actually a story about how would-be migrants who have just crossed into Mexico from Guatemala are
forced and tricked into paying for their passage using sexual favors. It's not that Rapists are streaming across there U.S. border, it's that the refugees of poverty and corruption in central American are being exploited in the
sexual slave trade of Southern Mexico.
Repeatedly Trump along with other Conservatives constantly proclaim that the border is a "sieve" as if it takes no effort at all to pass through and that the Obama Administration has put no effort at all into protecting our Southern Border, but as this chart from PewResearch shows U.S. Interdictions at the Border and Deportations have never been higher.
Continued over the flip.
As you can see from the chart the rate of Deportations under President Obama is on average over 2-3 times greater than the rate under President Bush. In fact during his entire 8-year administration Bush deported a total of 2 Million people, yet President Obama has already passed that mark in just 6 years.
The Obama administration deported a record 438,421 unauthorized immigrants in fiscal year 2013, continuing a streak of stepped up enforcement that has resulted in more than 2 million deportations since Obama took office, newly released Department of Homeland Security data show.
...
Most of the growth in the number of deported immigrants has come from those deported for reasons other than a criminal conviction. In 2013, 240,000 deported immigrants did not have a previous criminal conviction, up from 218,000 in 2012. Meanwhile, the number of deportations of those with a criminal conviction has stalled at around 200,000 for the past two fiscal years.
One distinct feature of the record number of deportations is the increasing share of deportations by U.S. Customs and Border Protection after border apprehension. In 2013, 25% of all deportations were carried out by the agency, up from 17% in 2012. Meanwhile, the number of deportations carried out by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which deports people caught both at the border and the interior of the country, fell in 2013 compared with 2012.
So in a nutshell, Border Enforcement is up - not down. In fact the deportation rate combined with the economic downturn in the U.S. has brought the overall
net rate of migration from Mexico to the U.S. to practically zero.
But of course, that's not the story you hear from Conservatives.
Washington Timea: Illegal Immigration Up, Deportations Down in 2014
The number of illegal immigrants crossing the border rose in 2014, while deportations dropped, according to new statistics Homeland Security released Friday in a pre-holiday data dump that signaled potential problems on both sides of the immigration enforcement equation.
...
This year’s statistics are informed by a number of complex and shifting factors, most notably the 68 percent increase in migration from countries other than Mexico, predominately from Central America, and a 14 percent drop in Mexican migration since fiscal year 2013,” he said.
...
As for deportations, the administration said of the roughly 102,000 immigrants deported from the interior of the U.S., about 87,000 had criminal records. That means only about 15,000 rank-and-file illegal immigrants with no criminal records were deported, which works out to about 1 out of every 1,000 illegal immigrants estimated to be in the U.S.
As you can see the Washington Times figures of only 102,000 deportations are wildly different than what PewResearch reports as being in the 400,000 range. This can be resolved by looking directly at DHS own numbers
for FY 2014 which shows that they chose to
completely ignore all the deportations that actually occur at the border mostly likely because it would completely debunk their political narrative that the "border is wide open".
Each year, ICE immigration enforcement is impacted by operational factors, including the size of the removable population found in the interior and encountered at the border by CBP, appropriated resources, fluctuating migration patterns, and the legal authorities that govern ICE’s activities. In 2014, each of these factors affected ICE operations and contributed to the number of ICE’s FY 2014 removals, which was 315,943, down from 368,644 in FY 2013. This report sets forth and analyzes ICE’s FY 2014 immigration enforcement statistics:
- ICE conducted 315,943 removals.
- ICE conducted 102,224 removals of individuals apprehended in the interior of the United States.
- 86,923 (85 percent) of all interior removals involved individuals previously convicted of a crime.
- ICE conducted 213,719 removals of individuals apprehended while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States.
- 56 percent of all ICE removals, or 177,960, involved individuals who were previously convicted of a crime.
- ICE apprehended and removed 86,923 criminals from the interior of the U.S.
- ICE removed 91,037 criminals apprehended while attempting to unlawfully enter the United States.
These numbers while still lower than the Pew results are still much higher than those reported by the Washington Times. What both of them say though is that the lower rate for 2014 isn't the result of policy changes by the administration, they are instead the result of an increase in the percentage of undocumented immigrants who
aren't coming from Mexico who can be quickly and easily sent back, rather more and more are coming form Central America which makes returning them to their native county more difficult and expensive.
Also, a new shift in migration patterns emerged over the last two years: more Central American immigrants and unaccompanied children crossing the border. These trends have led to an increase in apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border. On the other hand, the number of Mexican immigrants apprehended at the border and the interior has continued to decline from a high of 1.1 million in 2005 to 425,000 in 2013.
Another factor the Conservative Washington Times doesn't mention, because they can't, is the fact that DHS is only budgeted to remove about 400,000 people per year, so they're already operating
pretty much at full capacity.
Rather than addressing this somewhat complex reality, demagogues such as Trump instead claim that the "Mexican Government is Sending..." criminals into the U.S. He's now parading around with the family of murder victims whose loved ones were killed by illegal immigrants, but the total amount of crime coming from the undocumented is far lower than the overall rate of crimes in the U.S.
Data on immigrants and crime are incomplete, but a range of studies show there is no evidence immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans. In fact, first-generation immigrants are predisposed to lower crime rates than native-born Americans. (The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for restrictive immigration laws, has a detailed report showing the shortfalls of immigrant crime data.)
Immigration and crime levels have had inverse trajectories since the 1990s: immigration has increased, while crime has decreased. Some experts say the influx of immigrants contributed to the decrease in crime rates, by increasing the denominator while not adding significantly to the numerator.
...
The Congressional Research Service found that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants do not fit in the category that fits Trump’s description: aggravated felons, whose crimes include murder, drug trafficking or illegal trafficking of firearms.
The facts of the matter are that the actual rate of undocumented Mexican migrants attempting to enter the U.S. has fallen dramatically, while the rate of apprehensions at the border as well as those deported from the nation's interior remain at
record high levels even with the President's new policies of deferred action for juveniles who were brought here prior to 2012 by their parents, and the undocumented parents of children who were born in the U.S. who - other than entering without a visa - have not otherwise committed crimes.
There may be rare cases like Lopez Sanchez who shot a young woman in San Francisco, but the vast majority of undocumented immigrants are not coming to commit crimes, to murder or to rape anyone.
But admitting those facts, and letting go of their scary illegal whipping horse would completely deflate the campaign of someone like Trump. Now of course we do need immigration reform, starting with streamlining and modernizing the visa system and removing the H1-B and H2-B Visa Caps which block migrant workers from being able to "enter the legal way" in the first place.
There is a statutory numerical limit, or "cap," on the total number of foreign nationals who may be issued an H-2B visa or otherwise granted H-2B status during a fiscal year (FY). Currently, Congress has set the H-2B cap at 66,000 per fiscal year, with 33,000 for workers who begin employment in the first half of the fiscal year (October 1 - March 31) and 33,000 for workers who begin employment in the second half of the fiscal year (April 1 - September 30). Any unused numbers from the first half of the fiscal year will be available for employers seeking to hire H-2B workers during the second half of the fiscal year. However, unused H-2B numbers from one fiscal year do not carry over into the next.
People can enter legally if they have family in the U.S. who are citizens or residents, they can enter as a student or as a visitor, you can enter as a refugee, but if your goal is to come to America to find a blue collar job, and do it legally, once the cap of 66,000 visas has been reached (which it has for this year)
You. Can't. Enter. Legally.
So is it truly a wonder why so many people are willing to risk being raped, or die of exposure in the desert - since the border fence and surveillance drones have made crossing the southern border far more dangerous - in order to escape crushing poverty and destitution all because they can't get the documentation since Congress has established a completely arbitrary cap that doesn't allow businesses who are honestly looking for workers to even be able to legally recruit them from outside the U.S. once they already attempted to recruit from inside the country and failed.
Now, there are complications to all this. None of it is cut and dried simple. But the truth is that what it's really going to take to change the undocumented persons who just wants a chance at a better life for themselves and their children to those with legitimate documentation or else to deport them all really isn't anything we're hearing from anyone in the GOP because they don't really want to fix the problem they just want to keep fear mongering and scapegoating in order to generate and maintain votes from the xenophobe class.
Vyan