Republicans Are LYING About Undocumented Immigration

 Julio Ricardo Varela exposes the Republican lies about undocumented immigration at MSNBC.com:

Republicans (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Democrats) have given Americans the impression that we’ve been experiencing an “invasion” at our borders. But a new Pew Research Center reportreleased Thursday not only shatters that myth but also reveals that the opposite is true. According to the report, the country’s unauthorized immigrant population peaked at 12.2 million in 2007, that is, when George W. Bush was president, and that population has been steadily decreasing since then. The Pew report found that the unauthorized immigrant population in the United States stood at 10.5 million in 2021, a 14% decrease from what it was in 2007.

If those numbers shock you, then there’s a reason for it. Not a week goes by without somebody in the Republican Party promising mass deportations of unauthorized migrants. They can’t talk about the U.S. border with Mexico without falsely describing it as “open.”

Once proudly described as a nation of immigrants, the United States has become a nation of immigration enforcers thanks to Republicans making immigration a wedge issue that too many Democrats are afraid to challenge.

Republicans say that they don’t mind immigrants entering the country legally; they want to decrease the number coming in illegally. Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening.

Pew noted that at the same time the United States’ population of unauthorized immigrants dropped 14%, there was a 29% increase in what it calls the lawful immigrant population, and the number of naturalized U.S. citizens grew 49%. Of the 47 million foreign-born individuals living in the United States in 2021, the Pew report found, 23.1 million, slightly less than half, were naturalized citizens. . . .

Despite the data showing a steady decrease in the number of unauthorized migrants living in the U.S., Republicans continue to hysterically cast unauthorized migrants as a national security issueand argue that their presence changes the very substance of who and what America is.

But as the numbers from Pew show, to the extent that the demographics in this country are changing because of people coming to the U.S., it’s being driven by people coming here through official channels, not those illegally crossing our southern border. . . .

Behind Mexico and El Salvador, the report says, the country of origin with the next largest unauthorized immigrant population in the U.S. is India.

Changing demographics are not a reason to panic, but with former President Donald Trump as their leader, Republicans have chosen panic, and they have plenty of voters who support them in their overreaction. . . .

The roughly 10.5 million undocumented people in the United States are not faceless, and there is enough political support out there to make sure they are seen as the human beings they are. Republicans might be excoriating them, which is dangerous and terrifying, especially for immigrant communities, but those same immigrants help form the fabric of American society. Distorting statistical reality for GOP political expediency is now the standard. But Thursday’s Pew report gives Democrats the opportunity to radically change the conversation.