The republican President Donald Trump has a habit of developing policies that at are based on his preconceived notions, which are not based on facts and reality but rather on “fake news,” with an anti-immigration bias championed by his base. At some point facts matter and this is especially true regarding the issue of immigration.

Here is the rest of the story based on facts...

Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century, in October 2015 was already hearing the republican would be President Donald Trump telling his lies based on “fake news” regarding immigration. He wrote the following warning piece in response.

THE 4 BIG LIES ABOUT IMMIGRANTS – AND THE TRUTH

Donald Trump has opened the floodgates to lies about immigration. Here are the myths, and the facts

MYTH:  Immigrants take away American jobs. 

Wrong. Immigrants add to economic demand, and thereby push firms to create more jobs. 

MYTH: We don’t need any more immigrants. 

Baloney. The U.S. population is aging. Twenty-five years ago, each retiree in America was matched by 5 workers. Now for each retiree there are only 3 workers. Without more immigration, in 15 years the ratio will fall to 2 workers for every retiree, not nearly enough to sustain our retiree population.

MYTH: Immigrants are a drain on public budgets. 

Bull. Immigrants pay taxes! The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy released a report this year showing undocumented immigrants paid $11.8 billion in state and local taxes in 2012 and their combined nationwide state and local tax contributions would increase by $2.2 billion under comprehensive immigration reform.

MYTH: Legal and illegal immigration is increasing. 

Wrong again. The net rate of illegal immigration into the U.S. is less than zero. The number of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. has declined from 12.2 million in 2007 to 11.3 million now, according to Pew Research Center.

Don’t listen to the demagogues who want to blame the economic problems of the middle class and poor on new immigrants, whether here legally or illegally. The real problem is the economic game is rigged in favor of a handful at the top, who are doing the rigging.

We need to pass comprehensive immigration reform, giving those who are undocumented a path to citizenship. Scapegoating them and other immigrants is shameful.

• There are other important facts about immigration which have been distorted by opponents to immigration. (Source: 4/20/17 Center for American Progress report by Michael D. Nicholson)
• Immigrants are becoming homeowners at a faster rate than the U.S.-born population. From 1994 to 2015, immigrant homeownership rose 2.3 percentage points while U.S.-born homeownership remained flat. Jacob Vigdor of the University of Washington estimates that immigrants contribute $3.7 trillion to housing markets nationwide.

• Compared with all Americans, U.S.-born children of immigrants are more likely to go to college, less likely to live in poverty, and equally likely to be homeowners. Thirty-six percent of U.S.-born children of immigrants are college graduates—5 percent above the national average. Eleven percent of adult U.S.-born children of immigrants live in poverty—below the national average of 13 percent—and 64 percent are homeowners, 1 percent below the national average.
• Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes or be incarcerated than the U.S.-born population. A 2017 study by the Cato Institute found that the 2014 incarceration rate for immigrants—both authorized and unauthorized—ages 18 to 54 was considerably lower than that of the U.S.-born population. While the foreign-born share of the U.S. population grew from 11.1 percent to 13.5 percent from 2000 to 2015, FBI data indicate that violent crime rates across the country fell 16 percent, while property crime rates fell 21 percent during the same time period.

• Working-class, immigrant-headed households with incomes less than 200 percent of the federal poverty line rely less on public benefits and social services than comparable U.S-born households. In 2015, working-class, immigrant-headed households with children received 9.3 percent of their overall income from public programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program and Social Security, in comparison with U.S.-born-headed households, which received 15 percent of their income from such programs. Research consistently shows that working-class immigrants use social programs such as Medicaid and Supplemental Security Income at similar or lower rates than native-born households.
• Unauthorized immigrants are increasingly entering the United States legally and overstaying visas rather than crossing the border. In 2014, 42 percent of the unauthorized population—around 4.5 million individuals—were visa overstayers. Two-thirds of new unauthorized arrivals in 2014 entered the United States on legal nonimmigrant visas and overstayed their visas’ validity period. Visa overstays have exceeded unauthorized border crossings every year from 2007 through 2014, and, over this period, a total of 600,000 more individuals overstayed visas than entered the United States by crossing the border. According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, the three largest source countries of visa overstayers are Canada, Mexico, and Brazil.

Here is link to entire report: The Facts on Immigration Today: 2017 Edition – Center for American 

As per a 1/11/18 Atlantic report by David A. Graham,  Since the start of his campaign, Trump has depicted immigration as a zero-sum game. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said during his candidacy announcement. 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.”

“His presumption seems to be that other nations are deliberately sending to the United States their least-desirable citizens. ”

“This is not how immigration works. Governments are not deciding who to send. People are deciding to leave, often at great risk, out of personal motivation. (They have to file an application to be considered and being selected is literally like winning the lottery as many apply but few are approved.)  Those who come are the ones “who had a special love for freedom and a special courage that enabled them to leave their own land, leave their friends and their countrymen, and come to this new and strange land to build a New World of peace and freedom and hope,” as Ronald Reagan once put it.”

“This entirely different paradigm is one reason Trump, unlike most of his fellow Republicans, wants to limit not only illegal immigration but legal immigration as well.”

“This zero-sum mentality is why he approaches refugees as safety threats and drains on U.S. government resources, seldom considering the reasons refugees have been driven to leave. There’s a middle ground—there are people who believe that on the one hand, refugees deserve aid but that on the other hand the United States must work within its means, and safety threats must be eliminated—but Trump’s comments, both previously and about Haitians and Salvadorans now, demonstrate this is not his view.”

“Trump’s decision to label these places “shitholes” is coarse and revolting, but the greater failure is his inability to connect his assessment with what it means for the people who live there. He either cannot see or is not interested in the conflicts and violence and poverty that immigrants are seeking to leave behind, and he is not interested in the extent to which the U.S. has contributed to these problems through interventions in El Salvador and Haiti. Thus his cavalier attitude about Haitians (though he was more than happy to acknowledge Haiti’s problems when that was an effective political weapon against Hillary Clinton) or Salvadorans, 200,000 of whom the government announced this week would have to leave, having been allowed to stay following earthquakes in 2001. The historic U.S. role as a hemispheric hegemon and as a symbol of humanitarianism simply does not interest Trump—aides last summer held a 90-minute crash course on this topic—because he cannot fit it into his calculus.”

Related Article:

Spinning the Facts on DACA – FactCheck.org

Fact check: Attorney General Jeff Sessions spins the facts on DACA

AP FACT CHECK: What the Trump administration said about DACA