Is Immigration Data Partisan?
Good-faith disagreements are possible but they must be rooted in reality.
Have you also noticed this peculiar problem? In the immigration world, there seems to be widespread confusion about what it means to be wrong and what it means to make a debatable claim with evidence.
Here's an example. At the first Trump-Biden debate, Trump claimed that only 1% of immigrants attend their hearings.
We studied this question by looking specifically at immigrant families released near the border, and found that, in fact, 81% of released families attended all of their hearings. We also routinely release data on hearing attendance that shows the 1% figure to be wrong.
So how do we assess Trump’s claim? Simple: he’s wrong. Not only does he have no evidence of the 1% claim, there is also significant evidence to the contrary. And it’s not partisan to say so.
So let's take that 81% number. It’s not perfect, because it doesn't include everyone. Perhaps you could show that it is lower for some populations that aren’t families. But it’s not controversial or partisan to say so. How you interpret that number - the claim you make about it - as being high or low, good or bad, is up to the reader. We—TRAC—don't tell people what to do with the data.
But the data is still the data. (For the moment, let’s leave aside the philosophical debate about the politics of data.)
Trump could have made a debatable claim using reliable evidence based on the available data. Maybe it’s a travesty that 19% of immigrant families don’t attend all of their hearings? He could have made a plausible argument based on facts. Instead, he invented a number out of thin air to fit a political narrative that relies on misinformation and outright lies to tell a negative story about immigration.
Anti-immigrant extremists often rely on fabricated statistics to sound legitimate, because reality doesn’t fit their narrative. And if you question their wild inaccuracies, they either claim that you are partisan or shift the terms of the debate. It’s a purely expedient political strategy and it’s not intellectually honest. Don’t fall for it. And frankly, fact-checking people like that won’t change their minds, but it may change the minds of people in the audience.
There *are* good-faith disagreements about what’s broken with the immigration system. But those disagreements are not going to be productive if they aren’t rooted in some semblance of reality.
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