News Reporter: Fact Checker: Fact-checking what Trump and Clinton are saying about immigration

The truth behind the rhetoric

Fact-checking what Trump and Clinton are saying about immigration

Trump delivered his highly-anticipated speech on immigration this week, after much conjecture about whether he was “softening,” “hardening,” “pivoting,” etc., on the issue. We checked some of the most interesting claims in his 75-minute speech of his 10-point immigration plan. Then, we took a deeper dive on his Two-Pinocchio claims about “criminal aliens,” which refers to non-U.S. citizens convicted of committing a crime.

Below are some of the claims from our round-up. For the full fact-check of 10 claims, click here.

"There are at least 23 countries that refuse to take their people back after they've been ordered to leave the United States. Including large numbers of violent criminals, they won't take them back."

Trump is right about this, according to a letter written by Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who in June 2016 urged the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department to stop granting visas to countries that refuse to accept the deportation of their own citizens. The letter said such action has been taken only once, against Ghana in 2001. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) has said he would seek legislation that would sanction countries that refuse to take back their nationals.

The Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that the United States can hold convicted criminals for only six months in detention if a country refuses to accept them. More than 100 immigrants released from detention have later been charged in homicides.

"It's always 11 million. Our government has no idea. It could be 3 million. It could be 30 million. They have no idea what the number is."

Trump says the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States — which is estimated at 11 million — could be anywhere between 3 million or 30 million. A number of independent organizations researching immigrant flows and the federal government have arrived at the 11 million estimate for the population of undocumented immigrants, using calculations of Census data.

Our friends at PolitiFact and FactCheck.org have found Trump's 30 million figure to be bogus. A range of experts who study this issue say the margin of error for the 11 million figure may be plus or minus 1 million, but no serious research supports Trump's claim it could be as high as 30 million.

President Obama and Hillary Clinton "support visa overstays."

The Department of Homeland Security has a visa overstay identification process. According to DHS, there were nearly 45 million nonimmigrant visitors in fiscal 2015, with an overstay rate of 1.17 percent, or 525,127 people. That was the first time DHS provided an estimate of foreign visitors who overstayed.

But the Obama administration — and previously, the Bush administration — has been criticized by Congress, law enforcement officials and advocates forfailing to fix loopholes in the visa program.

Clinton's immigration proposal does not address visa overstays. The only mention of visa issues in her proposal is to "fix the family visa backlog," but it does not offer any specifics. According to the pro-immigrant group National Immigration Forum, there is an administrative backlog of processing visas for spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens. Clinton has said her "comprehensive immigration reform" proposal with a pathway to citizenship would fix the family visa backlog.

"Illegal immigration costs our country more than $113 billion a year. And this is what we get. For the money we are going to spend on illegal immigration over the next 10 years, we could provide 1 million at-risk students with a school voucher."

Trump states this $113 billion figure as an undisputed fact, but it comes from a report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which seeks to dramatically reduce legal immigration. So you immediately have to look at the numbers with skepticism.

Digging into the numbers, you see that burden on the federal budget is estimated to be just $29 billion, whereas $84 billion is supposedly borne by state and local governments. Why is that? The group counts the cost of educating the children of illegal immigrants, even if they are born in the United States and, thus, are U.S. citizens. "The birth of these children and their subsequent medical care represent a large share of the estimated Medicaid and Child Health Insurance Program expenditures associated with illegal aliens," the report says.

The report, however, says it tries to account for the taxes collected by federal and local governments from illegal immigrants, but the services used by undocumented immigrants outweigh revenue collections. (Taking into account tax revenues, FAIR says the net cost is about $99 billion.) We should note that because the federal government is currently running a deficit, U.S. citizens also receive more in government benefits than they pay in taxes.

(Courtesy of giphy.com)

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Clinton mischaracterizes Trump’s immigration plan

Clinton said in a recent interview that Trump “bullies and threatens to throw out every immigrant in the country.” Trump has called for deportations of undocumented immigrants, but has not called for removing every immigrant in the United States.

Her campaign said she misspoke — regular readers know we take that into account and don’t play gotcha. But then her campaign tweeted the same language, saying "in 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for president by describing Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals." The tweet included a video showing Trump’s comments about illegal immigrants, which ended with this warning: "Trump has made his plans for immigrants and their families clear."

The Clinton campaign is playing fast and loose with the language here, blurring the line between legal and undocumented immigrants.

Trump's campaign has been centered on the threat that he claims is posed by undocumented immigrants. His announcement speech was interpreted as an attack on Mexican immigrants, but he eventually clarified that he was talking about undocumented immigrants. His plan for a wall on the border, his denial of birthright citizenship and his pledge to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals are all part of his proposed efforts to thwart illegal immigration.

His proposal to make Mexico pay for the wall by halting remittances could affect legal immigrants from Mexico, but again he makes this proposal in the context of attacking illegal immigration; any possible effect on immigrants is a by-product of his plan to eliminate illegal immigration. We awarded Two Pinocchios for misleading language.

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Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio round-up.

–Michelle Ye Hee Lee