Part 5 of 6
This series is on how to talk-back to Trump’s lies about immigrants. Trump’s platform calls for roundup, arrest, concentration camps and deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants as well as, an end to birthright citizenship, barring undocumented children from schools, and separating migrant children from their parents.
This is the fifth article in a series on the Trump and Project 2025 agenda on immigration.
“Democrats are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare, because all of these people, by the millions, they’re coming in. They’re going to be on Social Security and Medicare and other things, and you’re not able to afford it. They are destroying your Social Security and your Medicare.”
Donald Trump
“Joe Biden gave migrants welfare, free hotels.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, Arkansas Republican
“Just last week, [AZ Rep.] Ruben Gallego voted to let the millions of people who poured into our country illegally cast a ballot in this upcoming election.”
Kari Lake, Arizona Senate candidate
All of these statements are false. There is no evidence that non-citizens are voting. When Kris Kobach, was Kansas Secretary of State, he sold the legislature the lie that non-citizens were voting, and they passed a law requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote. The law kept thousands of citizens from voting before a judge threw it out. Kobach couldn’t even come up with one case of a non-citizen voting.
There is no evidence that Biden is giving new immigrants welfare. A 1996 law barred all non-citizens from those programs. That includes SNAP (food stamps), nonemergency Medicaid, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). The only assistance available to an undocumented person is life-saving emergency medical care.
As for luxury hotels. That’s just a lie. The people who turn themselves in to the Border Patrol asking for asylum stay in hostels that immigrants call “iceboxes.” The Border Patrol keeps them cold to induce immigrants to self-deport. And for many arrested for illegal entry into the U.S., they go to an ICE prison.
Social Security is the exact opposite of what Trump says. Undocumented immigrants frequently pay into Social Security and Medicare because it’s deducted from their pay, but they’ll never collect because they use phony Social Security numbers. That helps Social Security and Medicare stay afloat. A 2019 study found that, if everyone here illegally were deported, the Social Security Trust Fund would be depleted by about $13 billion.
What about taxes? A brand-new study by the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy found that undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes in 2022. Missouri received $113.7 million. It would get $25.6 billion more if undocumented workers could get work permits. The Health Forward Foundation’s 2018 study on Missouri immigrants’ economic impact found they created $19.0 billion in annual gross product and 160,000 jobs. That’s right. Immigrants don’t take jobs. They create them!
Their kids, though, must be educated. In 1977 Tyler Texas kicked immigrant kids out of schools when the state refused to pay for their education. Parents filed suit, and in 1982 the Supreme Court in the case of Plyler vs. Doe said immigrant kids have a constitutional right to a K-12 education.
That decision stopped Alabama in 2011 from implementing a law Kobach wrote requiring schools to collect data on citizenship and immigration status when students enroll. Now, the Heritage Foundation is proposing to get a Trump administration to push to reverse Plyler v. Doe in the Supreme Court. Since immigrants pay their way in taxes, that proposal is not only cruel and bad social policy, but it makes no economic sense whatsoever.
Trump and company scapegoat immigrants in order to divert attention from the real thieves — the immigration industrial complex. Former KU professor Tanya Golash Bouzas wrote, “The immigration industrial complex is the confluence of public and private sector interests in the criminalization of undocumented migration, immigration law enforcement, and the promotion of “anti-illegal” rhetoric.”
It includes:
- The employers who suck up extra profits on the backs of the immigrants, steal wages and overtime, cheat the government out of taxes;
- CORE-Civic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) and the GEO Group, the largest private immigration jail operators;
- The Border Patrol ($4.8 billion budget in 2021) and ICE ($8.3 billion in 2021) the largest police force in the country;
- The Subcontractors of these agencies including the wall builders.
- The Mexican gangs that profit from immigration prohibition.
It’s estimated that border militarization will cost us $81 billion by 2030. So, as our tax dollars get diverted away from our needs for healthcare, education, climate mitigation, etc., what do we get for this? A layer of cheap, exploited labor with few rights to undercut our standard of living.
That’s why big business and Trump want to maintain it.
