It is election season and I really hate election season. It means you are guaranteed to have your evening news hijacked by political reports and meaningless stories about politicians criticizing each other. Last night I went to watch the evening news and caught the tail end of President Biden's speech at the Democratic National Convention. I'm glad I could catch it as I wanted to see if he did better than during his debate with Trump over a month ago. It's nice to see he can still read a teleprompter.
Unfortunately one of his comments is in direct opposition to to what former President Trump said during his Butler, Pennsylvania rally right as someone attempted to assassinate him. According to comments after the event, the former president said he turned his head to highlight a slide on illegal immigration causing the bullet to miss his head except for a small part of his ear, saving his life. Trump was attempting to show how illegal immigration has skyrocketed under the Biden administration. However last night, President Biden claimed that illegal immigration is at its lowest level since even before he took office.
So who is right? Is one lying? Or are they both telling the truth. The cynic in me says that any politician is incapable of telling the truth. So are they both lying? This prompted me to look at the numbers. Unfortunately you have to go to two different websites to get the statistics. The first place I found gave illegal immigration statistics all the way back to 1990. Unfortunately it only has numbers on a yearly basis but we can use them to compare how the Biden administration has done. The second site is the US Border Patrol website and they have numbers on a monthly basis for part of the current year and the full 3 years before that. I probably could have poked around on their site and gotten numbers back to 1990 but this keeps it simple. As the years are fiscal years, that means they run October through September and don't represent a calendar year. Fortunately if you adjust the component filter to only show just U.S. Border Patrol, the numbers match those on the first website. We can do an apples-to-apples comparison and not be misdirected, as some statisticians are prone to do.
The last year of President Trump's administration was 2020 and we had a fiscal year (FY) total of 405,306 illegal immigrants caught and/or expelled, known as "encounters." That seems to be a pretty low number. However if you look at FY 2017, you see that our country had the lowest number of illegal immigrants at only 310,531. I don't think that is a great number but it does represent years of decline for illegal immigration.
Now let's go back to Biden's statement from last night that illegal immigration is lower than when former President Trump was in office. It is important to remember that in June of this year, the President realized what an important issue this is and his administration started cracking down on it as seen by the dramatic fall in numbers. While it is true that numbers for July 2024 show a sharp decline for a single month, we still have over 1.4 Million encounters for FY 2024 with two more months to go. It doesn't take a math expert to realize no matter how few encounters happen in August and September, the total will never be below 405,306.
So former President Trump is using yearly numbers to make his case and President Biden is relying on a really good single month to make his. Technically they both can be telling the truth. I'll let you decide who is more correct. My guess is that if you are a liberal, you will side with the current president. If you are a conservative you will side with the former.
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