Immigration
Step Four: Don't Allow History to Repeat Itself
Some people say President Reagan’s amnesty plan was a “magnet” that increased the number of undocumented workers. Critics of his plan say his actions led to the quadruple-the-size problem we face today. Their logic seems to be that Reagan’s decision made us look soft on undocumented workers and, therefore, enticed a brand-new wave of them to flood through our borders.
Although the number of undocumented workers did significantly increase in the years after Reagan’s plan, it was not due to the amnesty component of the plan. The main flaw in the 1986 plan was this: Companies continued to hire undocumented workers and were not appropriately penalized. Simply put, the law was not enforced.
After Reagan’s law passed, it quickly became clear that businesses had become dependent on migrant labor and continued to have a huge appetite for undocumented workers and their low pay scale. Unfortunately – and for a variety of reasons, including lobbying by powerful industries like hospitality, agriculture, and construction – law enforcement on every level chose to look the other way. Basically 2.9 million unauthorized immigrants were granted amnesty without a serious plan to stop history from repeating itself. This cannot happen again.
Since this is such a turbo-charged, super controversial idea, let’s untangle the prevailing concerns and false narratives:
CONCERN ONE: NATIONAL SECURITY
Protecting our borders is one of 1787’s highest priorities and our plan will only help that endeavor. Many of the people coming back and forth are not new to our country – they are going back and forth to see their families. If they were legally allowed to travel, it would increase our level of national security because they could travel without fear and in broad daylight through established borders.
This also frees up resources to fix the current humanitarian crisis at the border, as well as help us keep unauthorized immigrants from entering America after our program is in place.
CONCERN TWO: DOMESTIC DISORDER
There seems to be a deep, pervasive fear in some Americans… the fear that something catastrophic is going to happen if we allow people into our country that speak, dress, worship or look different – and it speaks directly to our unease of the unknown. But in the context of immigration – authorized or unauthorized – it makes no sense.
Lest we forget, 10-11 million undocumented immigrants live here already – and have for years and years – and things are going pretty smoothly between us.
Obviously, this is not the narrative most Republican politicians sling – where they find the one man from Mexico who murdered someone in the Midwest, then plaster the horrific story all over the television in election years. Okay, maybe that one man did murder someone but, in a broader sense, this narrative is just not true.
On June 16, 2015, the day he announced his first run for the White House, Donald Trump famously said: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. 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.” Several weeks later, he doubled down on those comments saying, “What can be simpler or more accurately stated? The Mexican government is forcing their most unwanted people into the United States. They are, in many cases, criminals, drug dealers, rapists, etc.” On the 2024 campaign trail, he said things like undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” and that they come “from prisons and jails, insane asylums” and “savage gangs.” He claimed there are probably more like 21 million immigrants that had “invaded” and “occupied” America.
This is just nonsense. Out of the 2,901,142 migrant enforcement encounters by U.S. Customs and Border Protection nationwide in FY2024, 17,048 of them were arrested as “criminal aliens,” meaning they had been convicted of one or more crimes (whether in the U.S. or abroad) before being intercepted. That’s just 0.59 percent.
It’s also important to remember that the criminal records of these people include both violent and nonviolent offenses, including “Illegal Entry/Reentry” into the United States, which is what 10,935 – or 64 percent – of them had been arrested for. Only 1,084 of them had been convicted of “Assault, Battery, and/or Domestic Violence” and only 29 had been convicted of “Homicide or Manslaughter.”
We want to be clear about what we're saying here. Obviously one person who has been convicted of Assault, Battery, Domestic Violence, Homicide or Manslaughter is one too many crossing our border. But it’s super important that we keep perspective. If we don’t, we won’t be able to distinguish between the various challenges and they will all blur right into one another. The more tangled and convoluted these problems get, the more impossible they seem to solve.
Oh! And while we’re on the subject, although we most definitely need to keep a close eye on them, there is also no “infestation” of the street gang Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) or other violent street gangs coming through our borders – or even terrorists for that matter. In FY2024, U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 523 non-Americans nationwide who were affiliated with any gang, 72 of whom were allegedly affiliated with MS-13. And Donald was just dead wrong when he claimed on the 2024 campaign trail that “more terrorists have come into the United States in the last three years. And I think probably 50 years.” Regarding “all persons at ports of entry with terrorism-related records at the time of their encounter and non-U.S. citizens with terrorism-related records at the time of their encounter between U.S. ports of entry,” in FY2024 410 of them were encountered at and between land ports of entry and 106 between ports of entry – for a grand total of 0.0044 percent of total USBP encounters.
In the twenty-four years since 9/11, there has been only ONE case of a jihadist foreign terrorist organization coordinating a fatal attack inside the United States or of a lethal jihadist attacker receiving training or other support from terrorist groups abroad… and guess who the president was when that happened? Yep, Donald Trump. < the incident happened in 2019 at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Florida, when a Saudi Air Force officer, who was in the U.S. for military training, killed three U.S. sailors. >
A recent report from New America reported it this way, “Since 9/11, jihadists have killed 107 people inside the United States. This death toll is similar to that from far-right terrorism (consisting of anti-government, militia, white supremacist, and anti-abortion violence), which has killed 134 people. The United States has also seen attacks in recent years inspired by black separatist/nationalist ideology and ideological misogyny. Individuals motivated by these ideologies have killed 13 and 17 people respectively and those with far-left views have killed one person. America’s terrorism problem today is homegrown and is not the province of any one group or ideological perspective.”
In the Country Reports on Terrorism 2021, the U.S. State Department found “there was no credible evidence indicating international terrorist groups established bases in Mexico, worked directly with Mexican drug cartels, or sent operatives via Mexico into the United States in 2021… to date there have been no confirmed cases of a successful terrorist attack on U.S. soil by a terrorist who gained entry to the United States through Mexico.” Three years later, the 2024 report said there was still “no credible evidence indicated that international terrorist groups established bases in Mexico” and that “no one who gained entry to the United States through Mexico carried out a terrorist attack in the United States.”
A risk analysis of terrorism and immigration from 1975-2023 conducted by the Cato Institute – an American libertarian think tank – found that “a total of 230 foreign-born terrorists were responsible for 3,046 murders on U.S. soil from 1975 through the end of 2023.” The report goes on to say that “nine of them entered the U.S. as illegal immigrants; 79 were lawful permanent residents; 24 were students; 1 entered on a K-1 fiancé(e) visa; 29 were refugees; 13 were asylum seekers; 43 were tourists on various visas; 15 were from Visa Waiver Program countries; 1 entered on an A-2 visa for government business or military training; and 1 was on an H-1B visa for skilled temporary foreign workers. The visas for the remaining 15 terrorists could not be determined and are recorded as ‘unknown.’” The report concludes with this: “The chance of a person perishing in a terrorist attack committed by a foreigner on U.S. soil over that 49-year period was about 1 in 4.5 million per year. The hazard posed by foreigners who entered in different ways varies considerably. For instance, the annual chance of being murdered in an attack committed by an illegal immigrant was zero.”
Tons of other research on immigration and crime consistently show that immigrants – including those who are unauthorized – have either no impact or a diminishing effect on crime. In fact, multiple studies have found that unauthorized immigration specifically not only does not increase violent crime, but in some cases decreases it. Further, studies have shown that unauthorized immigration is associated with a reduction in drug arrests, drug overdoses, and driving under the influence, and others have found that it reduces rates of property crime, larceny, and burglary.
A study published in the Journal of Ethnicity in Criminal Justice, conducted jointly by four universities, discovered that: “Research has shown little support for the enduring proposition that increases in immigration are associated with increases in crime. Although classical criminological and neoclassical economic theories would predict immigration to increase crime, most empirical research shows quite the opposite. We investigated the immigration-crime relationship among metropolitan areas over a 40-year period. Our goal was to describe the ongoing and changing association between immigration and a broad range of violent and property crimes. Our results indicate that immigration is consistently linked to decreases in violent (e.g., murder) and property (e.g., burglary) crime throughout the time period.”
The Marshall Project – a nonprofit journalism organization that has won two Pulitzer Prizes – extended the study’s data six years, finding that “crime fell more often than it rose even as immigrant populations grew almost across the board. In general, the study’s data suggests either that immigration has the effect of reducing average crime, or that there is simply no relationship between the two.”
Another study by two prominent sociologists, published in the journal Criminology, confirms those findings: “Undocumented immigration does not increase violence. Rather, the relationship between undocumented immigration and violent crime is generally negative, although not significant in all specifications. Using supplemental models of victimization data and instrumental variable methods, we find little evidence that these results are due to decreased reporting or selective migration to avoid crime. We consider the theoretical and policy implications of these findings against the backdrop of the dramatic increase in immigration enforcement in recent decades.”
Another study by these two found that “increased undocumented immigration was significantly associated with reductions in drug arrests, drug overdose deaths, and DUI arrests, net of other factors.” They concluded that “there was no significant relationship between increased undocumented immigration and DUI deaths, and that their study “provides evidence that undocumented immigration has not increased the prevalence of drug or alcohol problems, but may be associated with reductions in these public health concerns.”
The Cato Institute found that “all immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than natives relative to their shares of the population. Even illegal immigrants are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans.” In another report focused on Texas, the Cato Institute says this: “Whether one focuses on criminal convictions, arrests, or the number of individuals convicted or arrested, the results are the same: illegal immigrants have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans in Texas. Legal immigrants have the lowest rates of all, except for some measures of property crime where illegal immigrants are even less crime prone. Native-born Americans living in Texas have the highest criminal conviction and arrest rates. Even on the margin, there is no statistically significant effect of the illegal immigrant population on the rate of criminal convictions, either overall or for illegal immigrants specifically. Crime, at least in the state of Texas, is a domestically produced problem and not an imported one. Texas is one of the states where we would expect higher illegal immigrant crime rates if they were an especially crime prone subpopulation. Texas’ proximity to Mexico, the reputation of its criminal justice system, and the state-level politics all militate toward increasing the illegal immigrant crime rate relative to legal immigrants and native-born Americans.”
Likewise, a study that compared the undocumented foreign-born population in U.S. metropolitan areas data with FBI Uniform Crime Report data found “negative effects of undocumented immigration on the overall property crime rate, larceny, and burglary; effects in models using violent crime measures as the outcomes are statistically non-significant.”