IMMIGRATIONDiseased Illegal Immigrants Aren’t “Invading” the United States
My research at the Cato Institute on crime and terrorism committed by illegal immigrants conclusively shows that they commit less crime than native-born Americans and have murdered zero people in domestic attacks since 1975. We also fond no statistically significant relationship between the size of the immigrant population, the illegal immigrant population, or the legal immigrant population and the spread of serious communicable diseases.
President Trump issued an executive order (EO) on January 20 titled “Guaranteeing the States Protection Against Invasion,” wherein he declares that illegal immigrants are invading the United States and he’s responding by suspending asylum along the southern border, restricting immigration more broadly, and activating other government powers. Trump’s declaration of invasion gives this justification for such a drastic order:
The sheer number of aliens entering the United States has overwhelmed the system and rendered many of the INA’s [Immigration and Nationality Act] provisions ineffective, including those previously described that are intended to prevent aliens posing threats to public health, safety, and national security from entering the United States. As a result, millions of aliens who potentially pose significant threats to health, safety, and national security have moved into communities nationwide.
My research at the Cato Institute on crime and terrorism committed by illegal immigrants conclusively shows that they commit less crime than native-born Americans and have murdered zero people in domestic attacks since 1975. This post fills in the gap in Trump’s invasion declaration by analyzing how immigrants affect disease in the US. We find no statistically significant relationship between the size of the immigrant population, the illegal immigrant population, or the legal immigrant population and the spread of serious communicable diseases on the state level during the 2021–2023 period when America was supposedly being invaded by diseased immigrants.
In other words, no reasonable disease prevention justification exists for the Trump administration’s declaration of an invasion.
Background
The US government should stop immigrants who threaten the health, safety, and national security of Americans from entering the United States. The first Trump administration closed the border during the pandemic by invoking Title 42, a public health law that empowers the government to prevent all people from crossing the border by halting legal entries and immediately removing unlawful border crossers to stop the spread of communicable diseases to the United States from abroad.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic during Trump’s first term, some of his immigration advisors searched in vain for a disease carried by migrants to justify invoking Title 42. The pandemic justified such extraordinary measures that the Biden administration kept in place until May 2023.
