Right before I read Jim Geraghty’s excellent Corner post on how President Biden’s State of the Union boasts about inflation were, well, inflated, I happened to read a report by Andrew R. Arthur, the stellar analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, on how Biden’s SOTU boasts about dramatic improvement in the crisis of illegal immigration at the southern border are also absurdly overblown.
In his speech, Biden brayed, “Since we launched our new border plan last month, unlawful migration from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela has come down 97 percent.” I will come momentarily to the administration’s new border plan, which, as I observed when Biden rolled it out, is both illegal and a political fraud. For now, though, let’s stick with what the president said. Even at face value, it was exaggeration. As Arthur runs the numbers, there was a decrease in unlawful migration from the four countries in question between December 2022 and January 2023, but it was a decrease of just 76 percent — and even that statistic makes the Biden administration’s immigration policies sound a lot more successful than they’ve actually been.
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