Illegal Immigration: Democrats and the mainstream press accuse President Donald Trump of manufacturing a crisis at the border. The numbers tell another story.
As soon as the words "growing humanitarian and security crisis at our Southern border" left Trump's lips in his Oval Office address this week, Democrats and media "fact-checkers" were trying to dispel it as a deliberate lie.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Trump "must stop manufacturing a crisis, and must reopen the government."
The Department of Homeland Security claims that about 20% of illegal border crossers make it into the country. Other studies, however, say border agents fail to apprehend as much as 50% of illegal crossers.
Even at the lower percentage, that means that 104,000 illegals made it into the country in 2018 alone.
Trump's critics certainly don't bother to mention that those figures only count illegals the border patrol caught. It does not count the ones who eluded border patrol agents and got into the country.
NPR's "fact check" — like countless others — dismissed Trump's claim as false because "illegal border crossings in the most recent fiscal year (ending in September 2018) were actually lower than in either 2016 or 2014."
What they aren't telling you is border patrol agents apprehended more than 100,000 people trying to enter the country illegally in just October and November of last year. Or that that number is way up from the same two months the year before.
Nor do they mention that last year, the border patrol apprehended more than half a million people trying to get into the country illegally. And that number, too, is up from the year before.
Trump's critics certainly don't bother to mention that those figures only count illegals the border patrol caught. It does not count the ones who eluded border patrol agents and got into the country.
The Department of Homeland Security claims that about 20% of illegal border crossers make it into the country. Other studies, however, say border agents fail to apprehend as much as 50% of illegal crossers.
Even at the lower percentage, that means that 104,000 illegals made it into the country in 2018 alone.
Is that not a crisis at the border?
Pelosi and company also don't bother to mention the fact that there are already between 12 million and 22 million illegals — depending on which study you use — in the country today.
Let's put that number in perspective.
At the high end, it means that the illegal population in the U.S. is larger than the entire population of countries like Syria, Chile, the Netherlands and Ecuador. Even if the number is just 12 million, that's still more than the entire population of Sweden, Switzerland, Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Ireland and New Zealand.
It is, in short, a massive number.