The Real Immigration Chaos? A Deluge of Misinformation

While Congress tries to pass sweeping immigration changes, public discourse about immigration loses touch with reality.

Congress is currently debating a zombie immigration bill that has been reported as both alive and dead, depending on the day of the week and the news outlet you read.

The bill does not represent the elusive “comprehensive immigration reform” that you may have heard so much about. Instead, it would focus on expanding the powers of the president to restrict migration, expand immigration enforcement, and greatly reduce the president’s use of what is called “parole” (i.e., the power to allow people into the country for humanitarian reasons) to allow access to asylum.

Or maybe that’s what the bill would do? No one I have talked to has seen a draft text. And there is a push from presidential candidate Donald Trump to blow up the bill so that he can run on immigration in the general election.

Listen to an explanation of the border bill on today’s The Daily.

The bill has prompted what I believe in fecal meteorology is called a “shitstorm” of radically unhinged misinformation. I was happily un-Twittered for most of the end of 2023, so when I anxiously logged back on in January, I was disappointed but not shocked to see the immigration discourse, in a word: bad.

While writing up some original analysis of interesting immigration data—remember data? that boring stuff?—I managed to mostly avoid the bizarre assertions that a president could somehow close the border tomorrow with a flick of the wrist or pen, or that no one had ever used parole authority before Biden discovered it lying around the White House when he arrived in 2021.

Anyone who has been in this field for more than a few years understands how strange it is that yesterday’s unheard-of footnote of immigration law is today’s polarizing hobby horse. I still remember in 2020 when presidential candidates on the Democrat debate stage talked about repealing “section 1326” (the part of Title 8 of the US code that criminalizes the unlawful re-entry of immigrants). I mean, GREAT, but, like … really? What a strangely specific talking point.

These days it’s parole. Parole is a provision that has been baked into immigration law for years that gives the president the authority to allow immigrants to enter for urgent humanitarian reasons. It has been used every year by every presidential administration for as far back as anyone can remember. It’s normal. It’s routine. It’s not particularly controversial.

Until now. President Biden has—and there is no debate about this—dramatically expanded the use of parole to address the humanitarian crisis of asylum seekers along the US-Mexico border. Biden has his critics on the left and the right for how he has been handling the crisis. I don’t really have a strong feeling about this as a researcher, but I think it has been interesting to analyze the Biden administration’s approach. But wherever you stand, the parole authority has been an essential part of the administration’s strategy.

In fact, a recent report by TRAC at Syracuse University looked at ten years of the use of parole and it clearly shows both the previous routine nature of parole under both Obama and Trump, as well as its increase under Biden, from 120,00—200,000 per year to a high of almost 800,000 most recently. The use of parole may be controversial, but the facts about the use of parole should not be.

Or so you’d think.

There has been a concerted effort in recent weeks to entirely rewrite history and pretend that President Biden invented parole. Before I give you examples, I want to start by saying that I don’t understand why anyone would bother with this rationale. The fact that Biden has used parole more than anyone is indisputable. No one needs to lie to make an argument that parole is being overused. (I’m not personally taking a position on whether parole is overused, I’m just saying you don’t need to invent facts to support that argument.)

I had seen this argument circulating online. But the first time I saw it stated clearly in print in a news outlet came when the Wall Street Journal last week cited Senator Lindsey Graham’s office as an authority on parole data. Graham’s office told the WSJ that parole had never been used more than 5,000 times in a given year.

Upon further investigation, the numbers that Graham’s office cited were from ICE’s “Lifecycle Report.” This is nonsense, but to understand why this is nonsense, you need to bear with me for a very short explanation.

The Congressionally-mandated “Lifecycle Report” is unique in that it merges data from multiple databases to create a selective and partial perspective on migrants that the agency has been able to track through multiple steps in the immigration process. As DHS has emphasized for years (citing concerns that the report would become politicized), the report is not designed to capture the totality of immigrants at any single point in the process. It’s not complete. It’s not designed to be.

Nevertheless, Graham’s office cited this report as an authority on the total number of people paroled per year, thereby creating a false impression that parole had been used less often (far less often) than in reality. WSJ reported these numbers as fact. When approached with this significant error, the WSJ did, thankfully, add a more credible source for the total annual numbers of parolees (TRAC’s report above) but left Graham’s original, demonstrably wrong assertion in place.

Whether Graham’s office is trying to intentionally mislead journalists about the actual numbers or simply doesn’t understand what the Lifecycle Report is—that’s an open question.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Just this week former White House advisor Stephen Miller claimed online: “The Biden Administration is the first Administration in history to release single adults traveling alone into the country.” (No, I’m not linking to him or his misinformation.)

It’s a bizarre claim because the data is freely available online to check this claim and see that it is wildly inaccurate. In fact, during the Trump administration, CBP paroled between 26,000 and 63,000 “single adults” per year into the United States.

Please notice that there is no question that Biden’s numbers are much higher at around 193,000 for FY 2023. Again both things can be true: it’s possible that many single adults were paroled into the US in the past AND it is possible that Biden has paroled even more people than in previous years.

These are just two examples of unhinged falsity that have circulated in recent days and weeks, but they illustrate the basic point about the disconnect between political discourse and reality.

So what’s going on?

This simple answer is that the empirical, fact-based, routine operations of the US immigration system are being massively distorted for political reasons. Worse yet, one need not even impose these distortions to make the arguments that politicians and other members of the public are trying to make.

Misinformation has been a part of public discourse in the United States for years. Nothing about misinformation itself is all that surprising. But misinformation is usually created and disseminated when actors need to spin a particular story. In this case, there is no need to spin a story. The data already support the argument that Biden is overusing parole.¹ It’s misinformation for misinformation’s sake. Or misinformation for the purpose of hyperbole. Or for likes and retweets.

Making empirically false claims even when it’s not necessary is a kind of flagrant disregard for reality that, in the past, has got us to where we are now, and I fear will only push Congress and the public further away from finding common ground to create meaningful changes to the immigration system.

That, of course, might be the point. As a wedge issue, immigration is most valuable to political parties as a problem that remains unsolved. When public figures, politicians, or news outlets further confuse the public by sharing false information, they only further confuse the public and undermine our ability to have a reasonable debate.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. I realize that. But I refuse to give up territory to people with no respect for the facts, no matter their party or political views. Facts aren’t everything in politics, but facts still matter. Or should, anyway.

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1. There will be some percentage of readers that confuse my acknowledgment that there is evidence that supports this argument with “I support this argument.” So let me just be clear that I’m not taking a position one way or another on the debate.