What People Really Care About When They’re Mad About Immigration

Part 1: “Immigrants are coming to kill you” is the lie that elected Trump

This is the first post in a series published every Monday morning for 10 weeks about why Trump was elected.

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“‘Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you’ is the only speech Trump knows how to give.” –Dara Lind^[1]

“You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it ‘Bulverism.’” -CS Lewis^[ii]

The biggest mistake a speaker can make is assuming a knowledgeable audience. This happens one-on-one all the time, which you’ve noticed if you don’t know anything about car repair and are stuck talking with an auto mechanic about why your jalopy won’t start. When customers reward them with blank stares or cringe-worthy questions like “Can you top off my brake light fluid?”, mechanics know to adjust their statements. “Brake lights don’t have fluid,” they must remind their customers. It can be embarrassing or funny in one-on-one conversations, but easy to correct once you observe the befuddlement. However, the befuddled response is harder to read in an audience and so it can lead to disaster. I caused one in 2013 in Arizona.

At that time, I’d been working on immigration policy for more than five years. Researching, writing, talking with policymakers, going on TV and the radio, and traveling around the country speaking to audiences on a growing and contentious topic. By then, I’d read over 1,000 dry academic articles full of detailed mathematical models, statistics, econometrics (complicated statistics for economists), and dull prose on the economics of immigration. Dog-eared narrative and academic histories of immigration crammed my bookshelves. Dry sociology, government reports, legal tomes, and budget data were piled high on my desk and filled with my notes. I’d been yelled at and corrected by bureaucrats, Congressional staffers, and experts, and even done some of my own yelling and correcting. I was in a bubble of know-it-all immigration experts, you know, normal people.

Arizona was ground zero for the immigration debate at the time. Even if the people riding the bus with me in the morning didn’t know everything about immigration, surely Arizonans did because the immigration issue had dominated the news for years there. Beginning in about 2004, more and more illegal immigrants were entering Arizona from Mexico. Most were going elsewhere, but many settled in Phoenix and other cities – working mainly in the construction or services industry. The state government passed laws in 2007 and 2010 to marshal state resources to force them out. My friend Todd, who lived in Arizona and was involved in state politics, invited me to come from Washington, DC, to talk with Arizonans, listen to their concerns, and give speeches about immigration. Arizona is where I created my own speaking disaster.

Todd arranged for me to speak to a group of mostly conservative Arizonans about immigration. My speech was about what I knew best: How immigration affected the economy, mostly for the better. “Immigrants,” I said, “were workers, entrepreneurs, investors, and consumers. They expand the supply and demand sides of the economy while using less welfare than native-born Americans.” The audience seemed engaged and interested from my lofty podium perch, but there was a problem when I stopped speaking. Nobody raised their hand to ask a question. I expected at least a few, maybe even a hostile rant directed at me but intended for the audience. Airborne fruit was also possible. But I met silence until an elderly woman raised her hand and asked, “Why don’t illegal immigrants just go to the Post Office to get a green card and become legal? What do they have to hide?”

At that moment, I realized my error. I’d been learning about immigration law, economics, social science, crime, history, and every topic related to immigration for years. Scores of books, hundreds of academic articles, thousands of conversations, and tens of thousands of news stories had crossed my desk. But at that moment, speaking in public, I realized that few in the audience knew that almost all immigrants couldn’t legally come to the United States and couldn’t just get a green card at the Post Office. Now, I begin speeches with a simple legal diagram of how to immigrate to the United States legally.

Source: Bier, David J. “Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible: US Legal Immigration Rules Explained,” Policy Analysis no. 950, Cato Institute, Washington, DC, June 13, 2023.^[iii]

Correcting my speeches after that was simple: show a diagram of the legal immigration system and briefly explain it. Those who gaze upon that Sovietesque legal confusion get it immediately: Illegal immigrants come illegally because they can’t use the legal system. Immigrants move here for economic opportunity and safety. Homicide rates and violence in the United States are a fraction of what they are in Latin America.^[iv] Mexican men who move here can raise their wages by almost threefold, including the cost of living. Vietnamese men can expect more than a sixfold increase in income. Those from Yemen? Wages are over fifteen times as great in the US as in their home country.^[v]

I’d move across the country, take my kids out of school, and tell them to make new friends for threefold higher wages. My life would be better. I’d drive a nicer car, have a bigger house, give more to charity, and probably take nicer vacations. But for a Yemeni immigrant, that 15-fold increase in wages is the difference between watching some of their children die from malnutrition or illness and all of them becoming accountants in Peoria. It’s the difference between having a gas range oven and cooking your food over burning dung. But there is no legal way for the vast majority of them to come here legally because the law stands in the way. Explained that way, most people understand why immigrants come illegally – even if they don’t condone it and want high border walls to stop it.

But her second question was more important: “What do they have to hide?” That’s a good question if you think it’s easy for immigrants to enter the United States legally. Most illegal immigrants have nothing to hide except themselves because immigration enforcement would either stop them from coming in the first place or deport them. The United States is a great country – the best in the world by my estimation – but there is no legal path here for almost all immigrants who want to become Americans. The first lesson is that I need to be clear that the law was the source of chaotic illegal immigration. But I missed the other lesson.

Two years after my disastrous speech in Arizona, I was taught that the debate over immigration policy wasn’t about economics or cultural assimilation or American values; it was about chaos and violence. It was about immigrants who are coming over the border to kill you. My teacher was Donald J. Trump, who announced he was running for President with a speech on June 16, 2015, that included this section:

The US has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.

Thank you. It’s true, and these are the best and the finest. When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting. And it only makes common sense. It only makes common sense. They’re sending us not the right people.

It’s coming from more than Mexico. It’s coming from all over South and Latin America, and it’s coming probably— probably— from the Middle East. But we don’t know. Because we have no protection and we have no competence, we don’t know what’s happening. And it’s got to stop and it’s got to stop fast.

Islamic terrorism is eating up large portions of the Middle East.^[vi]

Drugs. Crime. Rape. Murder. Terrorism. My, look at all the ways that immigrants are trying to kill you. Immigration reporter Dara Lind listened to just about every speech Trump ever gave on the topic and wrote that “‘Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you’ is the only speech Trump knows how to give.”^[vii] Of the billions of words written about Donald Trump’s political career, Lind’s are the most concise and accurate observations of the content of his speeches. “Illegal immigrants are coming over the border to kill you” is the topic that most energized his supporters, convinced others to support his plans for reducing even legal immigration, steered the policy debate for going on a decade now, and launched thousands of lies, misunderstandings, and incorrect statements about immigrants and their supposed danger to Americans.

Trump was answering the question posed by that elderly woman in Arizona and millions like her when she asked, “What do they have to hide?” In essence, Trump said that immigrants are hiding a murderous and criminal intent to kill you, your family, and everybody else you care about. And events seemed to confirm Trump’s warnings.

Kate Steinle was walking with her father and a friend along Pier 14 in San Francisco on July 1, 2015, when she was shot in the back by José Inez García Zárate – an illegal immigrant from Mexico. Steinle died hours later and Zárate was charged with murder. Zárate had previously been deported five times and had seven non-violent felony convictions in different states. He was only in San Francisco that day because he had been sent there by the Federal Bureau of Prisons for a 20-year-old marijuana charge – a crime that wasn’t even prosecuted by the city anymore.^[viii] San Francisco released Zárate, and he somehow acquired a gun that had been stolen from a ranger at the Bureau of Land Management and fired it. The bullet ricocheted off the ground and flew 90 feet into Steinle’s back, killing her just hours later.

Five months later and 7 hours south, Rizwan Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik murdered 14 people in an Islamist terrorist attack in San Bernardino. Farook was born in the United States. Malik legally immigrated in early 2014 on a K-1 fiancée visa to marry Farook.^[ix] On the morning of December 2, 2015, they left their six-month-old daughter with Farook’s mother in Redlands and then attacked his coworkers at the Inland Regional Center right as their holiday party was starting. They murdered 14 people and injured 24 others before being killed by the police after a car chase and shootout. It was the deadliest terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 at that point.

Steinle’s murder by an illegal immigrant and the San Bernardino terrorist attack convinced many Americans that Trump was right about immigrants. Larry Kudlow, an economic commentator who previously supported expanding legal immigration for economic reasons, wrote, “I have come to believe there should be no immigration or visa waivers until the US adopts a completely new system to stop radical Islamic terrorists from entering the country. This calls for a wartime lockdown and a big change in my thinking.”^[x] He wasn’t the only one convinced that immigrants are coming to kill us.

When Trump accepted the Republican nomination for President a third time in 2024, his comments about immigrants were again about them coming over the border to kill you – this time as an invasion. He talked about Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin – all tragically murdered by illegal immigrants.^[xi]

The murder victims lost everything. Kate Steinle was robbed of decades of life, her family and loved ones hurt in ways that few of us can imagine. The 14 people shot to death by Malik and Farook are gone forever, living on in the memories of the people who knew them. The 17 people they injured and the dozens of others at that holiday party-turned-slaughterhouse will never forget the terror. Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and Rachel Morin were cut down by vicious criminals. Is this an invasion?

No, this is crime and terrorism caused by a handful of sick individuals. Most immigrants in the United States come here to work and raise families. Malik immigrated legally after she was sponsored by her American-born husband, but Zárate immigrated illegally several times after being repeatedly kicked out. But even so, illegal immigration is not an invasion. The Nazi’s attack on France in 1940 isn’t called an invasion because the German army broke French immigration laws; it is an invasion because it was a foreign army that entered France to attack and conquer it. There’s no similarity between the Nazis going to Paris in 1940 and illegal immigrants coming here for jobs or to flee violence in their home country, even if a small number of them end up committing violent and property crimes here. Russian soldiers didn’t invade Ukraine in 2022 looking for jobs, they crossed Ukraine’s border as an army to conquer the country. Politicians like Trump and Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who also calls illegal immigration an invasion, do so because it’s lurid rhetoric and because they would have more government power if it actually were an invasion.^[xii]

Abbott said, “The only thing that we’re not doing [to stop illegal immigration] is we’re not shooting people who come across the border because, of course, the Biden administration would charge us with murder.”^[xiii] They wouldn’t be charged with murder if it were an invasion, and the thought wouldn’t have even crossed his mind. The federal government is obligated to defend states from invasion, and state governments are empowered to defend themselves if invaded.^[xiv] Invasions are violent and require violence to counter, violence like shooting soldiers, bombing ships, mobilizing armies, and deploying other intensive military hardware. Illegal immigration causes problems, but different problems on a scale so insignificant by comparison that it’s hard to compare it to an invasion with a straight face. The closest link between immigration and an actual invasion is terrorism, but even here, the threat is so small that it’s statistically irrelevant.

In 2015, the year of Steinle’s killing and the San Bernardino attack, there were about 42 million immigrants living in the United States.^[xv] In that year, 17,525 people were murdered in America – many fewer than would have been killed if the 42 million immigrants were here to kill us. Twelve percent of them lived in Texas and committed 74 homicides out of the 707 homicide convictions in the Lone Star State that year. The other 633 murders were committed by native-born Americans. And yet, nobody says that native-born Americans or Texans are coming to kill us. In 2022, the most recent year with available data, the illegal immigrant criminal conviction rate for homicide was 36 percent below that of native-born Americans. Legal immigrants were even less crime-prone, with a homicide conviction rate 63 percent below that of natives.^[xvi] Homicides committed by illegal and legal immigrants are less common than Trump’s speeches would have led you to believe.

Terrorism is the other main concern. A total of 230 foreign-born terrorists were responsible for 3,046 murders on US soil from 1975 through the end of 2024. During that time, a million people were murdered in other ways in the United States. Foreign-born terrorists like Malik and the 9/11 hijackers were responsible for less than 1 percent of all the murders – about 3 in 1,000, to be exact. That’s a poor showing for a group of people who are supposedly coming here to kill us.

Exaggerating small threats and ignoring counterevidence is a form of lying. It’s dishonest, but less malicious than telling an outright falsehood. Many of the lies about immigrant criminality, terrorism, and danger are exaggerations or rely on ignoring counterevidence. Others, like Trump’s complete fabrication that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are “Eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” during his third run for President in 2024, are simple lies.^[xvii] There was no reported instance of Haitians eating cats and dogs, but conservatives masquerading as journalists came out of the woodwork to support his lies with a video of chickens being grilled in a neighboring town where African immigrants live with live cats walking around. Seriously.^[xviii]

The first mistake I made when speaking in Arizona over a decade ago was assuming that the audience had the background knowledge about immigration as I did. My second mistake was assuming why they were skeptical of immigration to begin with. I focused on economics, my lifelong intellectual obsession. Instead, I should have been focusing on chaos and safety – on murder, terrorism, and invasions. That elderly woman in Arizona told me so, I should have listened earlier, and I eventually did after Donald Trump confirmed what she said. The result of finally opening my ears is this substack series.

It was obvious in retrospect. A second Arizona law to more vigorously enforce immigration laws was passed by the state legislature in 2010 in response to the murder of a prominent rancher named Robert Krentz. He had been warning about illegal immigration and drug smuggling for almost 20 years before being shot dead on his ranch. By all accounts, Krentz was a standup guy. In an interview about illegal immigration, he said, “And you know, if they come in and ask for water, I’ll still give them water. I –you know, that’s just my nature.”^[xix] Nobody knows whether he was murdered by an illegal immigrant, a drug smuggler, or somebody else, but the state legislature acted by passing the harshest state-level crackdown on illegal immigration in decades. Fear over competition for jobs or cultural drift or welfare consumption didn’t prompt the legal change, fear over immigrants coming to kill Arizonans did it.

Those other issues matter, but they are counterbalanced by the economic opportunity that comes with immigrants, the cultural vibrancy, and our proud history of welcoming and assimilating the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Fear of violence, death, and chaos terrifies people more than the difficult-to-find stories of immigrants taking their jobs or barely learning to speak English. If immigrants really were coming to kill us, that would be a good reason to close the borders. Even the most diehard pro-immigration intellectuals and activists support screening out violent and property criminals, terrorists, and others who mean to do us harm.

Murder committed by anyone is horrific, no matter the circumstances. Being killed by a murderer in a botched robbery, being shot in a mass shooting, or being blown up in a terrorist attack are no laughing matters. But the exaggeration of those threats by commentators, the public, politicians, journalists, writers, analysts, and others who are not the victims deserves our derision and a chuckle. Their lies, when they lie, deserve our scorn. Those fearful observers are almost always disproportionately more scared than the actual risks and hazards justify, often by orders of magnitude, and we should laugh at their innumerate fears. Perhaps even guffaw when they propose multi-trillion-dollar government responses to infrequent and manageable risks. And cackle when they lie.

We should all laugh at extreme exaggerations and greet such statements of impending doom with a reality-informed smile when critics of immigration make wild claims about how they are coming to kill you. It’s time to vanquish the taboo of treating absurd exaggerations of risk with respect, while also acknowledging that immigrants sometimes commit crimes, just like lightning sometimes strikes. When a thunderstorm rolls through town, the prudent thing to do is get out of the swimming pool, not to ban swimming.

Donald Trump fueled an entire political movement with outrageous lies of immigrant violence that drove him into the White House twice. In his second term, he has so far declared an invasion, illegally sent non-criminal illegal and legal immigrants to a foreign prison in El Salvador, ignored the courts by deporting people under legal protection, rounded up US citizens, unleashed masked deportation agents on American streets, and activated the Alien Enemies Act and more all because he and his supporters lie about immigrant violence. This series is about why this is a lie.

Years of research, number crunching, and news story gathering went into this substack series. It begins with a focus on immigrant criminals with a specific focus on murderers, then shifts to dissecting the differences between sympathetic and less sympathetic victims of immigrant crime. After that, the chapters sequentially dive into myths and the facts about mass shootings, terrorism, terrorism committed by illegal immigrants, and foreign-born spies.

There are over 50 million immigrants in the United States today. Some of them are killers, some are drug smugglers, and some of them may even become terrorists. But almost all of them are not killers, do not smuggle drugs, and will not become terrorists. Chaos theory is when the disorder caused by illegal immigrants crossing the border, which is linked to crime and terrorism in the minds of millions of Americans, convinces them to oppose immigration generally. But by just about every measure, immigrants are less likely to kill you than native-born Americans and even make you safer. The bulk of them are good people despite Trump’s lies. Immigrants are not coming here to kill you.

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^[1] Dara Lind, “‘Immigrants Are Coming over the Border to Kill You’ Is the Only Speech Trump Knows How to Give,” Vox, January 9, 2019.

^[ii] https://web.archive.org/web/20040519070713/http://www.barking-moonbat.com/God_in_the_Dock.html.

^[iii] David J. Bier, “Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 950, June 13, 2023.

^[iv] World Bank, “Intentional homicides (per 100,000 people) - Latin America & Caribbean, United States,” International Homicide Statistics database, UN Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC).

^[v] Michael A. Clemens, Claudio E. Montenegro, and Lant Pritchett, “The Place Premium: Bounding the Price Equivalent of Migration Barriers,” The Review of Economics and Statistics 101, no. 2 (May 1, 2019): 201–213.

^[vi] TIME Staff, “Donald Trump’s Presidential Announcement Speech,” Time, June 16, 2015.

^[vii] Dara Lind, “‘Immigrants Are Coming over the Border to Kill You’ Is the Only Speech Trump Knows How to Give,” Vox, January 9, 2019.

^[viii] David J. Bier, “Kate Steinle and San Francisco’s ‘Sanctuary City’ Policy,” Cato at Liberty (blog), April 27, 2017.

^[ix] Julia Preston, “From Fiancé Visa to Green Card,” The New York Times, December 3, 2015.

^[x] Lawrence Kudlow, “I’ve Changed. This Is War. Seal the Borders. Stop the Visas,” RealClearPolitics, December 12, 2015.

^[xi] Donald Trump, “WATCH: Former President Trump FULL SPEECH at the 2024 RNC | LiveNOW FOX,” LiveNOW from FOX, streamed live on July 18, 2024, YouTube video; Court TV, “Alleged killer of Maryland mother of 5 Rachel Morin gets trial date, facing life sentence,” KJRH 2 News Oklahoma, July 18, 2024; “Judge sets $10m bond for second Venezuelan man accused of killing a 12-year-old Houston girl,” AP News, June 26, 2024; and FOX 5 Atlanta Digital Team, “DA not seeking death penalty for accused Laken Riley killer Jose Ibarra,” FOX 5 Atlanta, May 31, 2024.

^[xii] Alex Nowrasteh, “Explaining the Border Standoff between Texas and the Federal Government,” Laissez-Faire, Laissez-Passer w/ Alex Nowrasteh and David Bier (blog), January 27, 2024.

^[xiii] Bess Levin, “Greg Abbott Says the Only Thing Stopping Texas from Shooting Migrants Is the Headache of Potential Murder Charges,” Vanity Fair, January 12, 2024.

^[xiv] US Const., art. IV, § 4.

^[xv] American Community Survey, Selected Characteristics of the Native and Foreign-Born, S0501, 2015 5-year Sample.

^[xvi] Alex Nowrasteh, “Illegal Immigrant Murderers in Texas, 2013–2022,” Cato Institute Policy Analysis no. 977, June 26, 2024.

^[xvii] Merlyn Thomas and Mike Wendling, “Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets,” BBC News, September 15, 2024.

^[xviii] Justin Rohrlich, “‘Clearly chicken you weirdo’: People respond to JD Vance sharing video he claims shows migrants grilling cats,” The Independent, September 15, 2024.

^[xix] “Illegal Immigrants and the Church,” Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, November 26, 1999.