For decades, the Republican party has been engaged in a hate-filled campaign to demonize immigrants as a threat to America. With the large increase in the number of migrants requesting asylum status at the U.S. southern border in recent months, presumed GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump, Republican politicians and their allied right-wing media outlets now falsely claim that the influx of immigrants constitutes a dangerous “invasion” that has set off a national crime wave.
In fact, numerous studies find that immigrants to the U.S. are less likely to commit crimes than native-born American citizens. Yet Trump, Republicans and their media echo chamber have effectively repeated this lie in order to instill fear among voters in the months before the 2024 presidential and congressional election. According to many polls, more Americans now name immigration as the most important problem facing the country.
It’s clear that Trump and others in his party use immigration as a not-so-subtle “dog whistle” to incite racial hatred, as he quotes Adolf Hitler to label migrants as “subhuman” “vermin,” and “animals” “poisoning the blood of America.” At an April 6 fundraising event, Trump’s racist views were obvious when he complained about the lack of immigrants to the U.S. from “nice” countries “like Denmark or Switzerland.” Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Phillip HoSang, an intern at the media watch group FAIR.org and a Master’s student at New York University. Here he talks about his recent article, “Fox News Border Stats Distort Immigration Reality” and the political weaponization of disinformation surrounding U.S. immigration issues.
PHILLIP HOSANG: The conservatives have kind of broadly been speaking, have used immigration fear-mongering as a cudgel. Ever since I’ve been a kid, I’ve heard the idea that our border is about to be overrun because Democrat presidents aren’t doing enough to stem the inflow of millions upon millions of migrants. And that’s just kind of continued to be the narrative and get more and more extreme over time as Trump has gone on.
And what kind of drew me to this was because I was kind of watching the general discourse and temperature about immigration, because it was a major point of conversation. I think polls right now show that in a lot of states, that’s the Number One issue currently on the docket for people looking at considering their voting prospects.
And when I was looking at the conversation, I noticed that a lot of it kind of sat in a lot of vague statements that were existing in spaces of, “Oh, this is how many illegal entries have existed. This is how many border contacts. This is how many people are illegally in the country.”
And there was a lot of conflation between terms and ideas that kind of arose red flags in my mind. So I decided I’d just started to do a bit of a deep dive into and try and figure out exactly what was going on, and disentangle some of the numbers to get a better idea of exactly what the situation at the border really was.
SCOTT HARRIS: Phillip, you do a lot of excellent dissection and analysis of the numbers that are thrown around on the flagship of the Republican and Trump propaganda campaign. And we probably can’t go into all the stats, but do a reality check for us. What are the numbers being thrown around on Fox and the other right-wing media networks? And what’s the reality that you found in terms of the real numbers?
PHILLIP HOSANG: Most recently, a lot of people have been talking about this 7.3 million number. This number is in reference to the CBP border contact number that basically identifies how many times Border Patrol officers have come into contact with different people who are trying to cross the border, whether it be between ports of entry or at ports of entry.
This is a very misleading number, because when people see that 7.3 number, One, they identify it as each one of these 7.3 million contacts are unique individuals. But when in reality, a lot of these people are people who were turned away previously, especially under Title 42, and then later once again came back to attempt to enter the country again.
And then Two, a lot of these numbers break into way more specific categories. For instance, when we look at the border contact number overall, that 7.3 number actually breaks more broadly into three categories, those being Title 42 expulsions and Title 8 apprehensions and inadmissibles. Inadmissibles being people who go to the border, who try and enter at a port of entry and are turned away or identified as not being admissible into the country.
Apprehensions being individuals who do attempt to cross between border crossings, but are caught by Border patrol. And then Title 42 being people who, specifically during the pandemic, were turned back without being allowed to put forward an asylum application underneath medical considerations because we were in the pandemic and we were looking to avoid a Covid influx into the country.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, thank you, Phillip. And I did want to ask you a bit about the “great replacement theory,” and you mentioned it in your article. For a long time now, Republicans and Donald Trump have cited the great replacement theory that Democrats are somehow have a nefarious plan to replace American workers and American voters with a flood of immigrants into this country.
Tell us a bit about how that fits in with the kind of information — or disinformation I should say — that’s coming out of Fox News, OAN, Newsmax and all the affiliated right-wing propaganda outlets.
PHILLIP HOSANG: I think a major issue that you start to see when it comes to conversations around immigration are a lot of political conversations in general, especially in the age of very strong kind of polarization, is that you start to see narratives come about that are constellations of more fundamental ideas that are appearing here.
So for immigration, it isn’t just that there’s an influx of immigrants. Instead, it’s an influx of immigrants that is of historic scale that are all coming to this country without any pushback who are able to stay in the country. That’s all being done at the behest of Democrats, who are seeing them as their golden goose towards having a permanent majority voter base in the country.
And when you have all these individual pieces that kind of fit together into this constellation in order to sell that narrative, it makes it that any individual piece becomes unassailable because they’re all relying on each other to sell that narrative.
For more information visit Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting at fair.org.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Philip HoSang (18:25). More articles and opinion pieces are found in the Related Links section of this page.
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