Posts
Immigration Myths
Immigration has become one of the world's hottest potatoes. It seems virtually everyone in every nation vilifies immigrants — everyone, that is, except that nation's economists. In the United States, the Congressional Budget Office projected that a surge in immigration over the period 2021-2026 would add $8.9 trillion to the nation's GDP over the next decade, simultaneously reducing the national deficit by $0.9 trillion. So it turns out this is less of a political topic than it is one of economics vs. misinformation, which makes immigration myths fair game to be placed squarely in the crosshairs of our skeptical eye.
I'm just going to say this up front: This is a completely US-centric
episode. It would not be practical to attempt a comprehensive discussion
of immigration issues in every country, so I'm confining this one to
the country where the majority of Skeptoid listeners are. To my
international listeners, you may either skip to your next podcast, or
stick around to better understand the volatile situation in the United
States.
One of the first things to understand is that there are many different types of immigrants, of many different statuses. Let's run through a few of these:
- US citizens who immigrated and eventually became citizens. It's still accurate to call them immigrants.
- Family members of immigrants: Foreign spouses, children, and other close relatives of US citizens or other lawful permanent residents.
- Employment-based immigrants:
There are five types of visas for this, EB-1 through EB-5, for about
140,000 people a year like investors, elite athletes, doctors,
professors, exceptionally skilled workers, religious workers, and so on.
- Temporary visa holders:
This includes people studying here with a student visa, and temporary
workers who legally are in the country to work for a limited period of
time. These also include people on an H-1B, H-2A or H-2B (which are the
seasonal migrant workers who come and go mostly according to
agricultural seasons), O-1, L-1, or other visa types.
- Refugees and asylum seekers:
Following the atrocities of WWII, international law incorporated the
right to seek asylum for persecution (or reasonable fear of persecution)
based on race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social
group, or political opinion. The United States is among 146 nations who
are signatory to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,
and in 1980 adopted the Refugee Act of 1980 which brought the US in line
with international obligations. This requires the United States — and
all 145 other signatory nations — to grant safe haven to asylum seekers.
At the time of this podcast, various judicial and executive actions
have placed the US in violation of these acts; and so while present
status is contradictory and unclear, refugees still make up a large
category of immigrants.
- Undocumented people: People who have entered the country without any of the above credentials, or who have overstayed their credentials. Obviously, these are the ones some Americans are concerned about or fearful of. They generally represent about one quarter of each year's immigrations, though that number may go up and down a lot year over year.
So that's six basic categories of immigrants — five of which are totally legal, and all of which are common worldwide. They come from every country, from every background, with every aspiration, for every reason. Suddenly the idea of an "immigrant" isn't so stark. It's blurry. Is there really any one thing you can say of "immigrants" that's accurate? Can such a culturally and economically diverse class be painted with a single brush?
I fear our episode today may be a fool's errand. For every myth about immigrants, there are many for whom it is true. So what I've done is go to all the articles I could find about immigration myths, and collected all of those that are worth talking about. But I ignored the answers given for each myth, and instead put the skeptical eye on the job, to cut through the popular stuff, and get to the real facts.
So without further ado, let's give ten top immigration myths the full Skeptoid treatment.
1. Immigrants commit more crimes than native citizens.
This is #1 because it's probably the most widely believed, and yet most surprisingly false, of all the immigration myths. It's often hard to study, because most states' arrest records don't include citizenship status. Only one state does, as of the time of this writing: Texas.
A 2020 study using data from the Texas Department of Public Study looked at data throughout the 20-teens to see who committed the most crimes. The results:
- US native citizens averaged from 1,000-1,100 arrests per 100,000 persons.
- Legal,
documented immigrants (five of those six categories we just talked
about) averaged 800-900 arrests per 100,000 — substantially fewer than
native citizens.
- But the most surprising? Undocumented immigrants — or "illegals" as some call them — were the most legal of all, averaging only 400 arrests per 100,000.
Why would this be? According to a paper by the Stanford Institute for Economic Research which studied males aged 18 to 40, undocumented immigrants are more likely to be employed, married with children, and in good health, which are all factors associated with a lower crime rate. Conversely, white males in the United States, especially those who did not finish high school, were more likely to be unemployed, unmarried, and in poor health.
And recall this data came from Texas, a state not renowned for its positive reporting about undocumented immigrants.
2. Immigrants raise the crime rates where they settle.
Based on 150 years of US Census Bureau data, a 2024 study by Northwestern University found that immigrants, including both legal and undocumented, are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than native citizens. Thus, increased immigrant populations end up being associated with declining crime rates.
3. Undocumented immigrants freeload all kinds of social services.
While immigrants fund social services with their taxes at about the same rate as native citizens, some are unable to access some of those very same services they funded due to their citizenship status. A 2023 brief by the Cato Institute found that in 2020, immigrants consumed 21% less welfare and entitlement benefits than native citizens. This again goes back to the fact that they are significantly more likely to be employed and in good health than native citizens.
4. Undocumented immigrants pay no taxes.
Immigrants,
documented or not, pay the same taxes everyone else does. They pay sales
tax, property tax, and almost all of them pay income tax — and when
they are illegally paid cash under the table, it's the American employer
who's committing a crime, not the worker. Various studies find that
undocumented immigrants pay between $90 and $140 billion dollars a year
in federal, state, and local income taxes.
5. Immigrant laborers drive wages down, harming native citizens.
Immigrants tend to complement, rather than compete with, native workers. Certain industries, such as agriculture, construction, and hospitality, tend to have their lowest-paying jobs filled more often by immigrant laborers. So since they are working different roles with different skills, their lower pay does not reduce the pay of native workers in other roles. On the contrary; the National Bureau of Economic Research found in 2024 that immigration from 2000 to 2019 increased wages for less-educated US born workers by 1.7% to 2.6%.
6. There is an unprecedented invasion at the southern border, constituting a national emergency.
For
several years during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, immigration
increased significantly worldwide as most national economies plummeted
and people desperately sought work. But these numbers were also skewed
in many countries where Venezuelans sought to escape their nation's
catastrophic economic collapse under Nicolás Maduro, most notably the
United States. In most years, illegal immigrants would evade border
patrol and so were never counted; but Venezuelans actively turned
themselves in to seek asylum. So the official count was much higher than
it would have been during those years.
Contrary to claims made by some, there has never been any evidence that any significant percentage of illegal immigrants are criminals or terrorists — except for, obviously, the crime of illegal entry.
7. Immigrants bring fentanyl into the US from Mexico.
No, they don't. The inflow of illicit fentanyl into the United States is an industrial scale operation, in which lone individuals splashing through the Rio Grande play no role whatsoever.
The actual way that fentanyl gets into the United States is via a large, well established, intercontinental pipeline, never better explained than in an October 2024 special report from Reuters. It starts with Chinese chemical suppliers, who operate with little oversight, and who manufacture the precursor chemicals needed to synthesize fentanyl. These are packaged in small boxes disguised as any of the millions of little ecommerce packages. Such boxes are consolidated into large master cartons by Chinese freight forwarders, and these master cartons are then combined and palletized. These pallets are then shipped by commercial passenger and cargo flights to the United States.
These all get through US customs with no problem, since the majority of them are legitimate little ecommerce boxes from Temu and Alibaba; which are so vast in number (each pallet may contain thousands of packages, all individual bits of merchandise addressed to individual American households) that customs could never possibly inspect them individually. It's called de minimis shipping, where the shipper declares that entire pallet to contain less than $800 worth of merchandise. Currently, over 4 million such packages a day enter the United States. Not all of the precursors get through, a few tons of it are seized in this process each year; it's a constant arms race between American scanning technology and American purchasing of cheap junk from Temu.
Recipients of precursors, usually US addresses near the Mexican border, accumulate them until they have enough to fill a small truck and drive it south into Mexico. American border officers don't care what leaves, and Mexican border officers rarely inspect anything. It goes to cartel-owned processing labs which synthesize the fentanyl. All that remains is to send it back to the United States for sale by dealers.
How does it get there? Every single day, hundreds of passenger cars driven by US citizens, often with smiling wives and happy children, and loaded with fentanyl, are waved on through the border back into the United States, where they deliver it to distribution centers.
Clearly, lone illegal immigrants running across the desert would be a much worse gamble for the cartels than Mr. John Q. Smileyface and his white American soccer mom wife, in their oversized crossover SUV.
It should be noted that for their report, the Reuters investigators spent $3,600 and bought everything they'd have needed to make $3 million worth of fentanyl.
8. Immigrants take good jobs from native citizens.
Economists are nearly all in unison that immigration provides an economic boost for any country. A larger workforce equals a larger GDP, and immigrant workers also create jobs by spending in local economies and by starting businesses — immigrants are 80% more likely to become entrepreneurs than native workers.
As far as entry level work that may compete with native workers who lack a high school education, we still don't see much conflict. In agriculture or restaurants, immigrants are often given manual labor tasks, while native workers manage and assume customer-facing roles.
9. It's easy to get citizenship legally, there's no reason they can't do that.
This claim is simply false — ask anyone who has completed the process. To apply for US citizenship, you must first get a green card, which grants legal permanent residency — and that process alone can take years or even decades. This isn't just for non-English speakers; it applies to people from England, Australia, Japan, anywhere — even Norway.
But then obtaining citizenship requires tests, substantial fees, and other barriers that disproportionately affect lower income and non-English speaking immigrants. So it's not easy, in fact it's not a realistic option at all for many.
10. The US has long had an open border policy which has been economically disastrous.
This has not been true since 1921, when the United States actually did have open borders. This was mainly because we had so much open space and we needed people to fill it, in order to drive economic growth. Which it did — enormously. It was another example of immigration being the fastest way to turbocharge your economy.
Today no nations have open borders, although there are several regions where certain nations allow freedom of movement between them, to live or work or attend school or whatever. This is to obtain the same benefits of immigration as a driver of growth. Examples include the Schengen Area in Europe, which is mostly the European Union countries; and a treaty arrangement between India, Nepal, and Bhutan.
.jpg)
