Media Talking Points Crash Into Immigration Realities

As the Republic races—on trembling knees—toward the finish line of a presidential election unlike any other, a number of media talking points are running headlong into immigration realities. The “silly season” of politics is now over with the race heating up, as the facts are laid bare.

Bill Clinton Goes Off Script

One of the most dubious claims advanced by DHS over the past three-plus years is that it is capable of vetting the tens of thousands of illegal migrants it is releasing—in violation of the law—into the United States monthly.

That assertion is so utterly dubious as to be laughable, and yet it has been accepted wisdom for most in a gullible media establishment that essentially ignored a June 2024 report by the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG) that debunked it with respect to “asylum seekers”, to say nothing of various reports from the House Judiciary Committee that undermine its fundamental premise.

And then, former President Bill Clinton went off script.

Speaking as a surrogate for the Harris-Walz campaign at a fish fry in Peach County, Ga., on October 13, Clinton attempted to attack Donald Trump for scuttling a “bipartisan” Senate border bill in the late winter and early spring:

On the immigration thing, [Kamala Harris is] the only candidate who has actually endorsed a bill that would hold down immigration any given year to a certain point and then made sure we gave people a decent place to live, didn’t divide people from their children. And we did total vetting before people got in. Now, Trump killed the bill. The bill was being written by senior Republicans in the Senate, and he killed the bill. Why?

There’s a lot that’s just not true in that statement, beginning with the fact that just one Republican was involved in the drafting of the proposal, Sen. Jim Lankford (Okla.), number 58 on the U.S. Senate seniority list, but the part of Clinton’s statements that’s drawn the most attention was what he said next:

You had a case in Georgia not very long ago, didn’t you? They made an ad about it, a young woman who had been killed by an immigrant. Yeah, well, if they’d all been properly vetted that probably wouldn’t have happened. But if they’re all properly vetted, that doesn’t happen . . ..

The “young woman” in question, of course, was Laken Riley, a 22-year-old Augusta University College of Nursing student who was killed in broad daylight in the college town of Athens, Ga., in late February.

Local police acted quickly in arresting a suspect in Riley’s homicide, Jose Ibarra, a 26-year-old Venezuelan national. He entered illegally near El Paso, Texas, in September 2022, was apprehended and then released by DHS into the United States.

Clinton’s allusions to Riley and her alleged killer are all the more puzzling given the fact that the Senate border bill in question would have done nothing to improve the vetting of illegal migrants (and would actually speed the release of illegal entrants).

The key takeaway, however, is the former president’s admission that migrant criminals have been released under the current administration into the country without proper vetting—again a clear contradiction of any number of claims to the contrary by the Biden-Harris DHS.

Vance Confronts Martha Raddatz

Speaking of alien criminals, the Trump-Vance campaign has been highlighting incidents of migrant-driven disorder in certain smaller cities in the United States, including Springfield, Ohio and Aurora, Colo.

Trump actually appeared in the latter city recently, after claiming that it had experienced an upsurge in violence committed by members of the Venezuelan criminal terrorist organization, Tren d’ Aragua (TdA).

Aurora’s mayor, former U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), complained that Trump’s claims “grossly exaggerated” TdA’s activities there, and not surprisingly, Vance was grilled about Trump’s statements by host Martha Raddatz on ABC News’ “This Week” program on October 13.

The subsequent ABC News report on that exchange is headlined “Vance stands by Trump’s false claims about Venezuelan gangs in Aurora, Colorado”, which sounds a bit conclusory. Here’s the key excerpt from the outlet’s official transcript, so you can judge for yourself:

Raddatz: I want to — we played some other comments about migrants and migrants including in Aurora, in Colorado, where Trump said the city had been invaded and conquered by Venezuelan gangs. The Republican mayor of the city said flatly, the city and state have not been taken over or invaded or occupied by migrant gangs.

So, do you support Donald Trump making those claims that the Republican mayor says were grossly exaggerated and have hurt the city’s identity and sense of safety?

I understand what you’re saying that some people left behind. But he’s making these statements that the mayor is flat out disputing.

Vance: Well, Martha, you just said the mayor said they were exaggerated.

Raddatz: Grossly exaggerated.

Vance: That means there’s got to be some — that means there’s got to be some element of truth here.

And, of course, President Trump was actually in Aurora, Colorado, talking to people on the ground and what we’re hearing, of course, Martha, is that people are terrified by what has happened with some of these Venezuelan gangs.

(CROSSTALK)

Raddatz: Senator Vance, I’m going to stop you because I know exactly what happened. I’m going to stop you. The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complex — apartment complexes and the mayor said our dedicated police officers have acted on those concerns. A handful of problems.

Vance: Only — Martha, do you hear yourself? Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem, and not Kamala Harris’s open border?

Americans are so fed up with what’s going on and they have every right to be and I really find this exchange, Martha, sort of interesting because you seem to be more focused with nitpicking everything that Donald Trump has said rather than acknowledging that apartment complexes in the United States of America are being taken over by violent gangs. [Emphasis added.]

Personally, that sounds like more than “standing by some false claims” to me—and also suggests that “false claims” are a two-way street on the issue. Plainly, if Raddatz “knows exactly what has happened” with respect to TdA in Aurora apartment complexes, she may want to share more of it with her listeners.

J.D., Lulu, and the Labor Participation Rate

J.D. Vance has been a busy wannabe vice president, also sitting down with the New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro for an interview published in the paper’s online edition on October 12.

Garcia-Navarro asked the current senator from Ohio about statements he had made while a law student at Yale in 2012, in which he questioned the federal government’s ability to deport millions of aliens unlawfully present here. Suffice it to say that as a candidate, Vance no longer hews to that opinion.

That exchange then turned to the feasibility of deporting large numbers of aliens illegally here, before Garcia-Navarro asked about the economic consequences of such a plan:

Garcia-Navarro: Let’s say you were successful in carrying out those mass deportations. One thing that everyone agrees on is that more housing is necessary in this country, right? The reason that there is a housing crisis is that not enough houses have been built.

Vance: And that we have 25 million people who shouldn’t be here. I think it’s both.

Garcia-Navarro: I know you do. I don’t think that many people who look into this agree with you. But about a third of the construction work force in this country is Hispanic. Of those, a large proportion are undocumented. So how do you propose to build all the housing necessary that we need in this country by removing all the people who are working in construction?

Vance: Well, I think it’s a fair question because we know that back in the 1960s, when we had very low levels of illegal immigration, Americans didn’t build houses. But, of course they did. And I’m being sarcastic in service of a point, Lulu: the assumption that because a large number of homebuilders now are using undocumented labor, that that’s the only way to build homes, I think again betrays a fundamental —

Garcia-Navarro: The country is much bigger. The need is much bigger. I’m not arguing in favor of illegal immigration. I’m asking how you would deal with the knock-on effect of your proposal to remove millions of people who work in a critical part of the economy.

Vance: Well, I think that what you would do is you would take, let’s say for example, the seven million prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force, and you have a smaller number of women, but still millions of women, prime age, who have dropped out of the labor force. You absolutely could re-engage folks into the American labor market.

Garcia-Navarro: To work in construction? . . . . I mean, the unemployment rate is 4.1 percent. . .. Most people who don’t work can’t work in the regular economy. They’re in the military, they’re parents, they’re sick, they’re old. They might not want to work in construction.

It was at that point that Vance launched into a discourse on a subject that my colleague Steve Camarota discusses often: the “labor participation rate”, that is the share of U.S.-born men of working age who are either working or looking for work.

As Camarota noted last September, that rate has been declining for the past six decades in most every state, and as a consequence “contributes to serious social problems, including suicide, crime, drug overdoses, and welfare dependency”.

Perhaps Vance is familiar with Camarota’s work, because here’s how the vice-presidential candidate explained the issue to Garcia-Navarro and her readers:

Vance: Well, I think that what you would do is you would take, let’s say for example, the seven million prime-age men who have dropped out of the labor force, and you have a smaller number of women, but still millions of women, prime age, who have dropped out of the labor force. You absolutely could re-engage folks into the American labor market.

Garcia-Navarro: To work in construction? . . . . I mean, the unemployment rate is 4.1 percent. . .. Most people who don’t work can’t work in the regular economy. They’re in the military, they’re parents, they’re sick, they’re old. They might not want to work in construction.

Vance: The unemployment rate does not count labor-force participation dropouts. And again, this is one of the really deranged things that I think illegal immigration does to our society is it gets us in a mind-set of saying we can only build houses with illegal immigrants, when we have seven million — just men, not even women, just men — who have completely dropped out of the labor force. People say, well, Americans won’t do those jobs. Americans won’t do those jobs for below-the-table wages. They won’t do those jobs for non-living wages. But people will do those jobs, they will just do those jobs at certain wages. Think about the perspective of an American company. I want them to go searching in their own country for their own citizens, sometimes people who may be struggling with addiction or trauma, get them re-engaged in American society. We cannot have an entire American business community that is giving up on American workers and then importing millions of illegal laborers. That is what we have thanks to Kamala Harris’s border policies. I think it’s one of the biggest drivers of inequality. It’s one of the biggest reasons why we have millions of people who’ve dropped out of the labor force. Why try to re-engage an American citizen in a good job if you can just import somebody from Central America who’s going to work under the table for poverty wages? It is a disgrace, and it has led to the evisceration of the American middle class. [Emphasis added.]

Or maybe he was simply channeling then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), who at a campaign event in Winterset, Iowa in August 2007 laid out a series of “truisms” about immigration, the second of which was:

[T]his nation is such that people in this country should have the first opportunity to be able to have jobs that pay well and have jobs that are decent. After that, the second crack goes to what we may need from other parts of the world . . ..

Tough to say, because Vance didn’t offer any attribution.

The Center and a few others have been discussing the public safety and economic implications of the current administration’s immigration policies for the past three-plus years. With the presidential campaign drawing to a close, media outlets now are forced to confront those implications head-on—and in many cases are running into a cold dose of reality.