By Grace Stevens, Age 14
From the start of U.S. history, there has always been extreme discrimination against immigrants. In recent months and years, news outlets and politicians have been spreading a lot of misinformation about immigrants.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, an immigrant is “a person who has come to a different country in order to live there permanently.” People immigrate for a variety of different reasons, from wanting better opportunities to seeking asylum.
Immigrants have an extremely positive impact on the country. The American Immigration Council states that immigrants “are helping make the United States a more prosperous and thriving country: by building housing wealth, keeping social services like Social Security and Medicare solvent, and filling in as a much-needed labor force in sectors like STEM, healthcare, and agriculture.”
Currently 53.3 million immigrants live in the United States, making up 15.8% of the total U.S. population. Mexico topped the list of birth countries of immigrants to the United States in 2023 with approximately 150,000 people, per the Pew Research Center. With an increase of non-European people immigrating to the United States, racism has slowed down the immigration process.
There are three main ways that an immigrant can become a citizen of the United States. “Immigration to the United States on a temporary or permanent basis is generally limited to three different routes: employment, family reunification, or humanitarian protection,” explains the American Immigration Council. The process can take years.
Additionally, there have also been laws made to make immigration harder or even impossible. An example of this is the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned all Chinese immigrants from entering the United States. Though this law was abolished in 1943, similar laws do still exist.
The Trump administration has dehumanized immigrants who don’t have documentation by calling them “criminals.” This accusation that entering the United States without legal documentation makes someone a criminal has been spread through all corners of the internet and different news outlets. However, immigrating to the United States without documentation is a civil violation, but not a criminal offense. This narrative has been used to target all immigrants, even though, as of 2023, 77% of immigrants in the United States are in the country legally, according to the Pew Research Center. In addition to the ethical complications, deporting undocumented immigrants also strains the economy. Deporting a million immigrants per year would cost $880 billion, according to the American Immigration Council.
According to the Journal of Marketing, Republicans are more likely to spread misinformation about immigrants than Democrats. The misinformation spread in the last few months has extremely accelerated, with Trump using many major tragedies to fuel his anti-immigrant agenda. On New Year’s Day, a truck attack in New Orleans resulted in dozens of injuries and 15 people dead, according to Rolling Stone. President Trump spread the fake news that the suspect in the case, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was an immigrant who had recently crossed the border. But Jabbar was a U.S.-born citizen. Fox News quickly picked up the lie. Though a correction was published later that day, the story had already gained lots of attention and encouraged Republicans to make calls to “close the border.”
The Trump administration pinning crimes on undocumented immigrants is a common way it has tried to alter public opinion about immigration. One of these lies is the idea that undocumented immigrants commit more crimes. However, undocumented immigrants have “substantially lower crime rates than native-born citizens and legal immigrants across a range of felony offenses,” according to AP News.
Trump has also used natural disasters as a way to turn Americans against immigrants. He claimed that relief money sent to states in the wake of Hurricane Helene in October 2024 was instead given to undocumented immigrants, according to the Washington Post. Although the Biden administration assured Americans that this was false, Trump’s ideas spread enough to raise unneeded tension after the hurricane.
The ideas that Trump is spreading about immigrants have undoubtedly affected their lives. Thirty-six percent of immigrants say that the false narratives spread by Trump have increased the racism, discrimination, and violence in their lives, according to KFF. As a 41-year-old Chinese immigrant man in California told KFF, “Donald Trump’s rhetoric has demonized all immigrants and make them feel like second-class citizens.”
