Donald Trump held another meandering press event on Thursday, filled with all kinds of dubious claims.
One claim that's earned him particular criticism was his allegation that more than 100 percent of new job creation has gone to immigrants. That immigrants are purportedly siphoning jobs away from nonimmigrant Americans — which is demonstrably false, by the way — has become a common refrain in his 2024 campaign. The latest iteration was outlandish, even by his standards:
Virtually 100% of the net job creation in the last year has gone to migrants. You know that? Most of the job creation has gone to migrants. In fact, I’ve heard that substantially more than — beyond, actually beyond that number 100%. It’s a much higher number than that, but the government has not caught up with that yet.
Journalists have already debunked right-wing misinformation attributing job growth under the Biden administration entirely to immigrants getting jobs.
Mathematically, though, Trump's statement is not even possible — another sign of Trump’s ongoing struggle with grade school-level concepts. And it’s also a sign of desperation. Trump launched his political career with a speech full of bigoted lies about immigrants — whom he painted broadly as rapists and ne’er-do-wells — being sent to the United States.
I'd argue his racist and xenophobic portrayals of immigrants have gotten even more surreal since then, particularly in the current election cycle. This year, Trump has called migrants “animals” and “not people” in speeches, accusing them of "poisoning the blood of our country.” In recent speeches, he’s routinely referred to serial killer Hannibal Lecter, attempting to associate the fictional character — who was held in a mental asylum — with immigrants who seek asylum in the U.S. So his made-up stat about immigrants somehow accounting for more than 100 percent of job growth is yet another tale he’s telling to sow fear and hate toward immigrants.
It’s noteworthy that Trump’s increasingly dehumanizing xenophobia comes as actual data about immigration and crime also shows him to be increasingly wrong.
Border crossings decreased for the fifth consecutive month in July, reaching the lowest level recorded since fall of 2020, when Trump was president. In fact, the number of border crossings has been so low that NBC News reports Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has struggled to find enough immigrants to use in his cruel publicity stunt of busing asylum-seekers across the country. And violent crime, which Trump associates with immigration — despite data that shows immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born citizens — has declined at "historic" rates under the Biden-Harris administration.
This data exposes how Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has been increasingly disconnected from reality of late. The facts simply aren’t on Trump’s side when it comes to the nightmarish scenes he paints for the public. To quote Trump-aligned rapper French Montana, “when the hate don’t work, they start telling lies.”