Trump’s hate-filled rant ignores facts on immigrant crime and economic benefits

Donald Trump’s hateful, falsehood-filled rant on Thursday blaming immigrants for crime, “social dysfunction” and economic hardship is refuted by a wide range of immigration statistics, which show clearly that immigrants dramatically bolster the US economy and commit crimes at far lower rates than people born in the US.

On Thursday evening, Trump condemned immigrants in a broad and vicious invective, painting them as “illegal and disruptive populations” and attacking “those that hate, steal, murder and destroy everything that America stands for”. He vowed to block all migration from “third world countries” to allow the “US system to fully recover”.

The president’s post follows a deadly shooting in Washington DC on Wednesday in which one National Guard member was injured and another killed by a 29-year old Afghan national who assisted the US military effort in Afghanistan and was evacuated to the US after the American military withdrew.

The shooting has sparked even more anti-immigration rhetoric from Trump’s administration, which has indicated it will further intensify its crackdown on immigrant communities - already a focal point of fierce opposition from civil rights groups, Democratic lawmakers and the public.

Since the shooting took place, Trump has vowed to conduct a comprehensive review of asylum cases and green cards issued to people from certain countries.

The unprecedented post from a US president – spiteful even by Trump’s standards contradicted extensive research showing irrefutably that immigrants to the US commit fewer crimes than people born there, and have done so for more than a century.

Despite Trump’s post, in which he claims incorrectly that 53 million people in the US – “most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels” – are contributing to “high crime”, economists have found that the immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated compared to individuals born in the US. This trend has remained consistent for the past 150 years.

Moreover, as immigration rates have risen in the past few decades, crime rates across the country have fallen dramatically. According to an analysis by the American Immigration Council (AIC), the immigrant share of the US population has more than doubled since 1980, rising from 6.2% in that year to 13.9% in 2022. During the same period, the overall crime rate dropped by 60.4%, from 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people to 2,335. This includes a 34.5% decrease in violent crime and a 63.3% reduction in property crime.

In his post, Trump also claimed that immigrants and their children “are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who … put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so”.

“A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family,” Trump added.

His claim is flatly contradicted by data showing that immigrants are significant contributors to the US economy. In 2023, undocumented immigrant households contributed $89.8bn in federal, state and local taxes, while holding $299bn in spending power, according to the AIC.

The organization also found that the vast majority of immigrants are not dependent on state governments to guarantee housing. Instead, in 2023, immigrant households paid more than $167bn in rent in the housing market and held over $6.6tn in housing wealth.

Trump, who also asserted that “this refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America”, singled out with particular malice what he described as “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia [who] are taking over the once great state of Minnesota”.

“Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for ‘prey,’” the US president said.

He added, with open racism, that Ilhan Omar – a member of Congress from Minnesota – was “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab” and suggested she had married her brother.

Home to the largest Somali population in the US, many of whom arrived as refugees fleeing famine and civil war, Minnesota was labelled a “sanctuary jurisdiction” by the justice department in August . According to the department, this designation applies to states, cities or counties with laws that “hinder the enforcement of federal immigration laws”.

Trump has previously accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country”, but despite repeatedly claiming that his immigration raids are targeting criminals across the country, a new study from the Cato Institute found that 73% of people detained by ICE have no convictions.

It also found that nearly half had no criminal conviction nor even any pending criminal charges and that only 5% had a violent criminal conviction.