Miami Herald
By Louis Jacobson
July 11, 2015
In
a July 8 interview with NBC, Republican presidential candidate Donald
Trump didn’t ease up his rhetoric about Mexican immigration — at all.
“The
Mexican government forces many bad people into our country because
they’re smart,” he told interviewer Katy Tur. “They’re smarter than our
leaders, and their negotiators
are far better than what we have, to a degree that you wouldn’t
believe. They’re forcing people into our country. … And they are drug
dealers and they are criminals of all kinds. We are taking Mexico’s
problems.”
In
the interview, Trump left no doubt that he believes the Mexican
government is taking an active role in pushing migrants into the United
States: He used the word “forcing”
four times to describe what the government was doing.
But
is it really the government forcing Mexicans across the border, rather
than individual decisions to leave, either to seek employment or to join
family members in the
United States?
A
range of immigration experts told PolitiFact that there is no evidence
to support Trump’s claim. (The Mexican Embassy did not respond to our
inquiries, nor did a Trump
representative.)
For
evidence, let’s start with the Mexican Migration Project, a bi-national
research effort founded in 1982 to study Mexican migration to the
United States. Anthropologists,
sociologists and other experts with the project gather data, including
field interviews with migrants, that illuminate migration patterns.
The
co-director of the project is Douglas Massey, a professor of sociology
and public policy at Princeton University. Based on more than three
decades of field research,
Massey finds Trump’s assertion to be flat wrong.
He
pointed to findings from a paper he published in 2014 in the journal
International Migration Review. In the paper, he and his co-authors
concluded that undocumented
migration from Mexico “was driven largely by U.S. labor demand and by
the existence of well-developed migrant networks that provided migrants
with access to U.S. labor markets despite a rising enforcement effort.
The taking of additional trips is likewise
tied to U.S. labor demand and access to migrant networks, as well as
the number of U.S. trips a migrant has accumulated over his or her
career.”
What about Mexican government efforts to push migrants into the United States? Nonexistent, Massey told PolitiFact.
“Mexico
has never had a policy of pushing migrants toward the United States,
much less ‘forcing many bad people into our country,’ “ Massey said.
“Mexican migration is
tied to social and economic circumstances on both sides of the border.”
Other experts sided with Massey.
“Immigrants
come to work or to join family,” said Jeffrey Passel, a senior
demographer with the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project. “And
no, the Mexican government
doesn’t force anyone to leave.”
“No,
the Mexican government doesn’t force anyone to move here illegally,
though it certainly doesn’t object,” added Mark Krikorian, executive
director of the Center for
Immigration Studies, a group that favors low levels of immigration.
Tom
Smith, a demographer at the University of Chicago, drew a contrast with
one historical example in which a government did take a role in pushing
certain people to emigrate
to the United States — the Mariel boatlift from Cuba in 1980.
“While
most immigrants were simply part of the general Cuban population of
people wanting to emigrate, it appears that the Cuban government did
intentionally send a disproportionate
number of those they deemed to be undesirables, including prisoners and
other institutionalized groups,” Smith said.
But there is no such evidence that the same thing has happened in Mexico, he added.
About
the closest support for Trump’s claim that we could find is the
argument that the Mexican government’s failure to provide strong
economic growth and restrain drug
violence has been a factor in convincing people to leave the country
and come to the United States. Still, it’s not accurate to equate the
Mexican government’s inability to accomplish these goals and the idea
that the government is forcing people to leave.
It’s
also worth noting that migration from Mexico to the United States has
been declining in recent years. This is due to demographic factors more
than anything else,
Massey said.
Trump
“does not seem to have gotten the memo, but undocumented migration
stopped in 2008 and has been zero or negative since -- not because the
economic fundamentals have
changed, but because the fertility rate dropped from 6.7 births per
woman in 1970 to 2.2 births today, bringing about an aging of the
population,” Massey said. “People initiate migration between the ages of
18 and 30, and if they don’t migrate then, they are
unlikely ever to migrate.”
In
other words, Massey said, the number of people in the age category most
conducive to immigration is dropping, so immigration is dropping as
well.
Our ruling
Trump
said “the Mexican government forces many bad people into our country.”
Setting aside the question of whether Mexicans who have come to the
United States are “bad”
or not, there is no evidence of any Mexican policy that pushes people
out of Mexico and into the United States. As has been the case for
decades, a combination of economic and family factors accounts for most
of the migration from Mexico to the United States.
We rate the claim Pants on Fire.
POLITIFACT FLORIDA
The statement: Donald Trump said “the Mexican government forces many bad people into our country.”
The
ruling: Setting aside the question of whether Mexicans who have come to
the United States are “bad” or not, there is no evidence of any Mexican
policy that pushes
people out of Mexico and into the United States. As has been the case
for decades, a combination of economic and family factors accounts for
most of the migration from Mexico to the United States.
We rate this claim: Pants on Fire.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
No comments:
Post a Comment