Donald Trump spent Sunday tossing out some extremely specific numbers relating to immigration. But where his claim of 58,000 non-citizens voting in Texas at least has an obvious source, however false it might be, some of his other numbers are not just false but mysterious.
Take Trump’s claim that “the cost of illegal immigration so far this year is $18,959,495,168. Cost Friday was $603,331,392.” The fact that he took it down to the last dollar does not make this any more true—according to the National Academy of Sciences, immigration benefits the country—but the really interesting question is where he got it. An analyst at the Cato Institute tells the New York Times that the highest number he’s seen on an actual study claiming costs of undocumented immigrants was $116 billion. That number came from an anti-immigrant organization and even the libertarian Cato Institute disagrees: “There’s no basis to any of those numbers about the fiscal cost.” At $250 billion, “The president’s numbers are even twice as bad.”
Or check out Trump’s claim that there are “at least 25,772,342 illegal aliens, not the 11,000,000 that have been reported for years.” Again with the specificity (and, interestingly, two of the last three digits being the same), but where is this number from? There’s a controversial study claiming that there are 22 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.—but that’s still 3,772,342 shy of Trump’s claim, so is that even what Trump is citing?
It’s a special kind of lie that is simultaneously way more specific than is usually used in estimating massive numbers, and offers a number that is well outside even the outliers among studies on the subject. It’s certainly not outside the realm of believability that Trump took the largest number anyone could provide him, inflated it according to his mood, and then decided his lie would be more believable if it ended in 3-other digit-two. But the fact that this seems like a reasonable theory about how the president of the United States is operating … that is unbelievable.