Raw Data: Illegal Immigration From Mexico

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Are unauthorized immigrants “pouring across the southern border”? Since Donald Trump said it, there’s automatically a strong chance that it’s a lie, and sure enough, it is.

According to Pew Research, the population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 at 6.9 million and has been dropping ever since. Currently it stands at 5.6 million. As the chart on the right shows, net migration from Mexico has been negative every year since 2008. But maybe the ones that are here are disproportionately murderers and rapists, as Trump also says. Nope. The number of unauthorized immigrants in US prisons is relatively small, and the bulk of the available research suggests that they’re incarcerated at lower rates than US citizens. It’s just another lie.