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Humanitarian Imperialism Created the Libyan Nightmare Chris Hedges
Business is Booming – by Mr. Fish
“We came, we saw, he died,” Hillary Clinton famously quipped when Muammar Gaddafi, after seven months of U.S. and NATO bombing, was overthrown in 2011 and killed by a mob who sodomized him with a bayonet. But Gaddafi would not be the only one to die. Libya, once the most prosperous and one of the most stable countries in Africa, a country with free healthcare and education, the right for all citizens to a home, subsidized electricity, water and gasoline, along with the lowest infant mortality rate and highest life expectancy on the continent, along with one of the highest literacy rates, swiftly fragmented into warring factions. There are currently two rival regimes battling for control in Libya, along with an array of rogue militias.
The chaos that followed Western intervention saw weapons from the country’s arsenals flood the black market, with many snatched up by groups such as the Islamic State. Civil society ceased to function. Journalists captured images of migrants from Nigeria, Senegal and Eritrea being beaten and sold as slaves to work in fields or on construction sites. Libya’s infrastructure, including its electrical grids, aquifers, oil fields and dams, fell into disrepair. And when the torrential rains from Storm Daniel — the climate crisis being another gift to Africa from the industrialized world — overwhelmed two decrepit dams, walls of water 20 feet high raced down to flood the port of Derna and Benghazi, leaving up to 20,000 dead according to Abdulmenam Al-Gaiti, Mayor of Derna, and some 10,000 missing.
“The fragmentation of the country’s disaster management and disaster response mechanisms, as well as deteriorating infrastructure, exacerbated the enormity of the challenges. The political situation is a driver of risk,” said Professor Petteri Taalas, Secretary General of the World Meteorological Organization.
Taalas told reporters last Thursday that “most of the human casualties” would have been avoided if there had been a “normally operating meteorological service” which “would have issued the [necessary] warnings and also the emergency management of this would have been able to carry out evacuations of the people.”
Western regime-change, carried out in the name of human rights under the United Nations doctrine of R2P (Responsibility to Protect), destroyed Libya – as it did Iraq – as a unified and stable nation. The flood victims are part of the tens of thousands of Libyan dead resulting from our “humanitarian intervention,” which rendered disaster relief non-existent. We bear responsibility for Libya’s prolonged suffering. But once we wreak havoc on a country in the name of saving its persecuted — regardless of whether they are being persecuted or not — we forget they exist.
Karl Popper in “The Open Society and Its Enemies” warned against utopian engineering, massive social transformations, almost always implanted by force, and led by those who believe they are endowed with a revealed truth. These utopian engineers carry out the wholesale destruction of systems, institutions and social and cultural structures in a vain effort to achieve their vision. In the process, they dismantle the self-correcting mechanisms of incremental and piecemeal reform that are impediments to that grand vision. History is replete with murderous utopian social engineering — the Jacobins, the communists, the fascists and now, in our own age, the globalists, or neoliberal imperialists.
Libya, like Iraq and Afghanistan, fell victim to the self-delusions peddled by humanitarian interventionists — Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Ben Rhodes, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. The Obama administration armed and backed an insurgent force that they believed would do the bidding of the U.S. Obama in a recent post urged people to support aid agencies to alleviate the suffering of the people of Libya, a plea that ignited an understandable backlash on social media.
There is no official tally of the casualties in Libya that have resulted directly and indirectly from the violence in Libya over the last 12 years. This is exacerbated by the fact that NATO failed to investigate casualties resulting from its seven month bombardment of the country in 2011. But the total figure of those killed and injured is likely in the tens of thousands. Action on Armed Violence recorded “8,518 deaths and injuries from explosive violence in Libya” from 2011 to 2020, 6,027 of which were civilian casualties.
In 2020, a statement published by seven U.N. agencies reported that “Close to 400,000 Libyans have been displaced since the start of the conflict nine years ago — around half of them within the past year, since the attack on the capital, Tripoli, [by Field Marshal Khalifa Belqasim Haftar’s forces] started.”
“The Libyan economy has been battered by the [civil war], the COVID-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” the World Bank reported in April of this year. “The country’s fragility is having far-reaching economic and social impact. GDP per capita declined by 50 percent between 2011 and 2020 while it could have increased by 68 percent if the economy had followed its pre-conflict trend,” the report says. “This suggests that Libya’s income per capita could have been 118 percent higher without the conflict. Economic growth in 2022 remained low and volatile due to conflict-related disruptions in oil production.”
Amnesty International’s 2022 Libya report also makes for grim reading. “Militias, armed groups and security forces continued to arbitrarily detain thousands of people,” it says. “Scores of protesters, lawyers, journalists, critics and activists were rounded up and subjected to torture and other ill-treatment, enforced disappearances and forced ‘confessions’ on camera.” Amnesty describes a country where militias operate with impunity, human rights abuses, including kidnappings and sexual violence, are widespread. It adds that “EU-backed Libyan coastguards and the Stability Support Authority militia intercepted thousands of refugees and migrants at sea and forcibly returned them to detention in Libya. Detained migrants and refugees were subjected to torture, unlawful killings, sexual violence and forced labour.”
Reports by the U.N. Support Mission to Libya (UNSMIL) are no less dire.
Stockpiles of weapons and ammunition — estimated to be between 150,000 and 200,000 tons — were looted from Libya with many being trafficked to neighboring states. In Mali, weapons from Libya fuelled a dormant insurgency by the Tuareg, destabilizing the country. It ultimately led to a military coup and a jihadist insurgency which supplanted the Tuareg, as well as a protracted war between the Malian government and jihadists. This triggered another French military intervention and led to 400,000 people being displaced. Weapons and ammunition from Libya also made their way into other parts of the Sahel including Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Burkina Faso.
The misery and carnage, which rippled out from a dismembered Libya, was unleashed in the name of democratization, nation-building, promoting the rule of law and human rights.
The pretext for the assault was that Gaddafi was about to launch a military operation to massacre civilians in Benghazi where rebellious forces had seized power. It had as much substance as the charge that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, another example of utopian social engineering that left over a million Iraqi dead and millions more driven from their homes.
Gaddafi — who I interviewed for two hours in April 1995 near the gutted remains of his home that was bombed by U.S. warplanes in 1986 — and Hussein were targeted not because of what they did to their own people, although both could be brutal. They were targeted because their nations had large oil reserves and were independent of Western control. They renegotiated more favorable contracts for their nations with Western oil producers and awarded oil contracts to China and Russia. Gaddafi also gave the Russian fleet access to the port of Benghazi.
Hillary Clinton’s emails, obtained via a freedom of information request and published by WikiLeaks, also expose France’s concerns about Gaddafi’s efforts to “provide Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French Fran (CFA).” Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser to Clinton, reported on his conversations with French intelligence officers about the motivations of French President Nicholas Sarkozy, the chief architect of the attack on Libya. Blumenthal writes that the French president seeks “a greater share of Libyan oil”, increased French influence in the region, an improvement in his domestic political standing, a reassertion of French military power and an end to Gaddafi’s attempts to supplant French influence in “Francophone Africa.”
Sarkozy, who hasbeen convicted on two separate cases of corruption and breach of campaign finance laws, faces a historic trial in 2025 for allegedly receiving millions of euros in secret illegal campaign contributions from Gadaffi, to assist with his successful 2007 presidential bid.
These were the real “crimes” in Libya. But the real crimes always remain hidden, papered over by florid rhetoric about democracy and human rights.
The American experiment, built on slavery, began with a genocidal campaign against Native Americans that was exported to the Philippines and, later, nations such as Vietnam. The narratives we tell ourselves about World War II, largely to justify our right to intervene around the globe, are a lie. It was the Soviet Union that destroyed the German army long before we landed at Normandy. We firebombed cities in Germany and Japan killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. The war in the South Pacific, where one of my uncles fought, was bestial, characterized by rabid racism, mutilation, torture and the routine execution of prisoners. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were egregious war crimes. The U.S. routinely destroys democracies that nationalize U.S. and European corporations as in Chile, Iran and Guatemala, replacing them with repressive military regimes. Washington supported the genocides in Guatemala and East Timor. It embraces the crime of preemptive war. There is little in our history to justify the claim of unique American virtues.
The nightmares we orchestrated in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are minimized or ignored by the press while the benefits are exaggerated or fabricated. And since the U.S. does not recognize the International Criminal Court, there is no chance of any American leader being held accountable for their crimes.
Human rights advocates have become a vital cog in the imperial project. The extension of U.S. power, they argue, is a force for good. This is the thesis of Samantha Power’s book “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.” They champion the State Department’s R2P doctrine. Under this doctrine, states are required to respect the human rights of their citizens. When these rights are violated, then sovereignty is nullified. Outside forces are permitted to intervene. Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, warned in 2009 that R2P could be misused “to justify arbitrary and selective interventions against the weakest states.”
“Since the end of the Cold War, the idea of human rights has been made into a justification for intervention by the world’s leading economic and military powers, above all, the United States, in countries that are vulnerable to their attacks,” writes Jean Bricmont in “Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War.” “Until the U.S. invasion of Iraq, [a] large part of the left was often complicit in this ideology of intervention, discovering new ‘Hitlers’ as the need arose, and denouncing antiwar arguments as appeasement on the model of Munich in 1938.”
The creed of humanitarian intervention is selective. Compassion is extended to “worthy” victims while “unworthy” victims are ignored. Military intervention is good for Iraqis, Afghans or Libyans, but not for Palestinians or Yeminis. Human rights are supposedly sacrosanct when discussing Cuba, Venezuela and Iran, but irrelevant in our offshore penal colonies, the world’s largest open air prison in Gaza or our drone-infested war zones. The persecution of dissidents and journalists is a crime in China or Russia, but not when the targets are Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Utopian social engineering is always catastrophic. It creates power vacuums that augment the suffering of those the utopianists claim to protect. The moral bankruptcy of the liberal class, which I chronicle in “Death of the Liberal Class,” is complete. Liberals have prostituted their supposed values to the Empire. Incapable of taking responsibility for the carnage they inflict, they clamor for more destruction and death to save the world.
Former Republican representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming joined Vice President Kamala Harris on a stage hung with red, white, and blue bunting and signs that said “Country Over Party.” As Cheney took the stage, the crowd chanted, “Thank you, Liz!” The two were on the campaign trail today in Ripon, Wisconsin, the town that claims to be the birthplace of the Republican Party. It was in that then-tiny town in 1852 that Alvan E. Bovay, who had recently emigrated from New York, called for a new political party to stand against slavery.
The idea of a new party took off in 1854 when it became clear the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitting the westward expansion of human enslavement would become law. When they met in February of that year, people in Ripon were early participants in the movement of people across the North to defend democracy. Rather than standing against slavery alone, those organizing in 1854 stood against an entire political system, opposing the small group of elite enslavers who had taken over the U.S. government in order to establish an oligarchy and were quite clear they rejected the self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence that all men were created equal. Instead, they intended to rule over the nation’s majority, whose labor produced the capital that southern leaders believed only elites should control.
In the face of this existential threat to the country, party divisions crumbled.
Pundits have described today’s event as a component of Harris’s ongoing outreach to Republicans, and in part, it is. That outreach, begun under President Joe Biden and continuing even more aggressively under Harris, is bearing fruit as in an open letter today, two dozen Republican former officials and lawmakers in Wisconsin endorsed Harris and her running mate Minnesota governor Tim Walz. “We have plenty of policy disagreements with Vice President Harris,” the Republicans wrote. “But what we do agree upon is more important. We agree that we cannot afford another four years of the broken promises, election denialism, and chaos of Donald Trump’s leadership.”
Lately, there have been indications of what returning Trump to office might mean.
On Tuesday, Trump suggested that the U.S. soldiers who sustained traumatic brain injuries (TBI) when Iran attacked an Iraqi base where they were stationed were not truly injured, but simply had “headaches.” Trump’s statement brought back to light a 2021 CBS report by Catherine Herridge and Michael Kaplan that found the injured soldiers had not been recognized with a Purple Heart, awarded to service members wounded or killed in the line of duty, despite qualifying for it. This slight meant they were denied the medical benefits that come with that military decoration.
The soldiers told Herridge and Kaplan that they were pressured to downplay their injuries to avoid undercutting Trump’s attempt to keep the casualty numbers in that incident low. With the story back in the news, Kaplan posted that after the report, the Army awarded the soldiers the Purple Hearts they deserved.
Journalist Magdi Jacobs recalled the argument of Trump’s lawyers before the Supreme Court that Trump could not prod a SEAL team to assassinate a rival because service members would adhere to the rules of their institutions. The Army officers’ bowing to Trump’s political demands proved that argument was wrong and set off “[m]ajor alarm bells,” Jacobs posted, suggesting that the military would not stand firm against Trump in a second term, especially now that the Supreme Court says a president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of official duties.
Scott Waldman and Thomas Frank of Politico’s E&E News covering energy and the environment reported today that two former White House officials said that Trump was “flagrantly partisan” when responding to natural disasters. One said that in 2018 Trump refused to approve disaster aid after wildfires to California, perceiving it as a Democratic state. To get disaster money, the aide showed Trump polling results revealing that Orange County, which had been badly damaged in the fires, “had more Trump supporters than the entire state of Iowa.”
Defending the Big Lie that Trump had won the 2020 presidential election, former Colorado county clerk Tina Peters in 2021 gave a security badge to a man associated with MyPillow owner Mike Lindell to enable him to breach the county’s voting systems in an unsuccessful attempt to find evidence of voter fraud. A jury found Peters guilty of four felonies related to the scheme. Today, District Court Judge Matthew Barrett sentenced Peters to nine years in prison.
But there are other stories these days of what the government can accomplish when it is focused on the good of all Americans.
About 45,000 dock workers in the International Longshoremen’s Association went on strike Tuesday when the union could not reach an agreement with the United States Maritime Alliance (USMX) employer group over a new contract. The strike shut down 36 ports from Maine to Texas, affecting about half the country’s shipping just as the areas hammered by Hurricane Helene desperately needed supplies. Dockworkers wanted a pay increase of up to 77% over six years and better benefits, as well as an end to the automation that threatens union jobs.
President Joe Biden reiterated his support for collective bargaining despite the threat to an economic slowdown from the strike. The Wall Street Journal editorial board excoriated Biden and the union, saying: “President Biden wants unions to have extortionary bargaining power, and he’s getting a demonstration of it on election eve. Congratulations.”
But today the International Longshoremen’s Association suspended the strike after USMX agreed to wage increases of 62% over six years. The two sides agreed to extend the current contract until January 15 to address the issues of benefits and automation. Administration officials White House Chief of Staff Jeff Zients, top White House economic advisor Lael Brainard, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su, and Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg helped broker the temporary agreement.
The government’s power to make things better is also on display amid the rubble and ruin left behind by Hurricane Helene. Yesterday evening, after taking an aerial tour of western North Carolina to survey the damage and receiving a briefing in Raleigh, President Biden thanked both “the Republican governor of South Carolina and the Democratic governor of North Carolina and all of the elected officials who’ve focused on the task at hand. In a moment like this, we put politics aside. At least we should put it all aside, and we have here. There are no Democrats or Republicans; there are only Americans. And our job is to help as many people as we can as quickly as we can and as thoroughly as we can.”
Biden explained that the federal government had 1,000 first responders in place before the storms hit, and that he had approved emergency declarations as soon as he received the requests from the governors. Yesterday he directed the Defense Department to move 1,000 soldiers to reinforce North Carolina’s National Guard to speed up the delivery of supplies like food, water, and medicine to isolated communities, some of which are accessible now only by pack mule.
He has already deployed 50 Starlink satellites for communication, and more are coming.
Teams from the Federal Emergency Management Agency are offering free temporary housing, as well as delivering food and water. They are helping people apply for the help that they need.
While Trump and MAGA Republicans insist that Biden is botching the response to Helene, CNN fact checker Daniel Dale noted that the response has gotten bipartisan praise. Republican governors Henry McMaster of South Carolina and Glenn Youngkin of Virginia both thanked Biden by name for what McMaster called a “superb” response.
So today’s bipartisan event in Ripon suggests far more than Democratic outreach to Republicans. It appears to be a commitment to a government that advances the interests of ordinary people, and protects the right of everyone to be treated equally before the law and to have a say in their government. Republican Abraham Lincoln articulated this worldview for his fledgling party in 1859 as it took a stand against oligarchs. Believing these principles accurately represented the aspirations of the nation’s founders, Lincoln called them “conservative.” People from all parties rallied to the party that promised to defend those principles.
“The president of the United States must not look at our country through the narrow lens of ideology or petty partisanship or self-interest,” Harris said today. “The president of the United States must not look at our country as an instrument for their own ambitions. Our nation is not some spoil to be won. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised: the nation that inspired the world to believe in the possibility of a representative government. And so in the face of those who would endanger our magnificent experiment, people of every party must stand together.”
“In this election, putting patriotism ahead of partisanship is not an aspiration. It is our duty,” Cheney said. “I ask all of you here and everyone listening across this great country to join us. I ask you to meet this moment. I ask you to stand in truth, to reject the depraved cruelty of Donald Trump.
“And I ask you instead to help us elect Kamala Harris for president. I know…that…a president Harris will be able to unite this nation. I know that she will be a president who will defend the rule of law, and I know that she will be a president who can inspire all of our children—and if I might say so, especially our little girls—to do great things. So help us right the ship of our democracy so that history will say of us, when our time of testing came, we did our duty and we prevailed because we loved our country more.”
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Notes:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-liz-cheney-joins-harris-campaign-rally-in-ripon-wis
https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-cheney-wisconsin-trump-89396853e5521c3870a3c88e04cbfd99
https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/02/adam-kinzinger-republicans-colin-allred-texas/
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/4914462-colorado-county-clerk-sentenced-election-breach/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/10/03/port-strike-over/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/03/politics/fact-check-trump-biden-hurricane-response/index.html
https://www.axios.com/2024/10/01/hurricane-helene-north-carolina-mules-aid
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Hurricane Helene caused mass destruction across the southeastern United States, leaving thousands needing aid and at least 227 people dead. Now, former President Donald Trump is using the disaster as a political cudgel, falsely claiming that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is out of money because it diverted funds to “illegal immigrants.”
“The Harris-Biden administration says they don’t have any money [for hurricane relief]. … They spent it all on illegal migrants,” Trump said Thursday during a rally in Michigan. “They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank.”
Trump’s claim is false. FEMA is not out of money, and no money was diverted to undocumented immigrants.
FEMA, a part of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), says it has enough funds for recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Helene. On Wednesday, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “We have the immediate needs right now.” Mayorkas said he was concerned there may not be enough funds for the rest of hurricane season, with another hurricane expected to hit later this week.
But any shortfall would be driven by the increase in extreme weather events — not disaster relief funds being diverted to undocumented immigrants. FEMA has a separate program, the Shelter and Services Program, which gives funds to local governments and nonprofits to provide shelter, food, and transportation to undocumented immigrants. In 2024, Congress allocated $650 million to the program. The administration has a legal obligation to spend funds for their Congressionally-authorized purpose.
During his presidency, Trump diverted disaster relief money to provide services for undocumented immigrants. In 2019, the Trump administration informed Congress that it was taking “$155 million from the disaster fund” for “immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers,” the Washington Post reported.
Trump’s lies about FEMA, which are ongoing, have also been amplified by other Republican allies, including Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), Representative Troy Nehls (R-TX), and Elon Musk.
This is not just another lie. Spreading misinformation about FEMA’s capabilities hampers relief efforts. On Friday, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said at a press conference that misinformation can lead to people who need help not registering for aid. “This level of misinformation creates the scenario where they won’t even come to us,” Criswell said.
Trump has always exploited undocumented immigrants for political advantage. But falsely blaming migrants for nearly every problem — real and imagined — is the core issue of the Trump 2024 campaign.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for a “crime wave”
Trump’s false claim that undocumented immigrants are responsible for a crime wave is a staple of his stump speech. On August 22, Trump claimed that the Biden-Harris administration “unleashed a deadly plague of migrant crime on our country by not doing their job.” At the Turning Point Action Conference in July, Trump told the crowd, “We have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime.”
There is no violent crime wave. Violent crime has declined or remained flat each year of the Biden administration. According to the FBI’s 2023 crime report, violent crime decreased three percent last year, and there was a significant decline in murder (-11.3%).
Jeff Asher, co-founder of AH Datalytics and crime statistics expert, told Popular Information he has not seen “any evidence” of undocumented immigrants fueling increases in crime. Asher previously looked at “violent crime across the 14 counties along the Texas border with Mexico” and found a “relatively steady violent crime rate below that of the rest of their state and the nation as a whole.” Furthermore, research shows that immigration is linked to decreases in violent crime, and neighborhoods with higher concentrations of immigrant populations have lower crime rates.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for voter fraud
Trump has also falsely claimed that the Biden administration is allowing undocumented immigrants to enter the country so that they can illegally vote and steal the 2024 election. Last week, Trump argued that the Biden-Harris administration “stole the FEMA money” so that they could give it to undocumented immigrants as a political strategy because they want them to “vote for them.”
During the presidential debate against Vice President Harris in September, Trump claimed that “a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.” Trump stated, “They can’t even speak English. They don’t even know what country they’re in, practically. And these people are trying to get them to vote, and that’s why they’re allowing them into our country.” This claim has been repeated by Trump and his allies for months. It is also rooted in a white nationalist conspiracy theory called the great replacement theory.
But the reality is that it is illegal for undocumented immigrants to vote in U.S. elections. Further, data shows it almost never happens. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank, maintains a database of voter fraud that found “fewer than 100 examples of non-citizens voting between 2002 and 2022, amid more than 1 billion lawfully cast ballots.”
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for driving up housing costs
During the vice presidential debate last week, Senator JD Vance (R-OH) claimed that housing is “totally unaffordable because we brought in millions of illegal immigrants to compete with Americans for scarce homes.” Vance also argued that undocumented immigrants are “one of the most significant drivers of home prices in the country.”
This is not true. Economists and housing experts told the Washington Post that many other factors are more significant than undocumented immigrants when it comes to increases in housing prices. Additionally, many immigrants come into the country with “few financial resources,” and are therefore “far less likely to be able to buy a home.” While there is evidence that an increase in immigrants may slightly increase rent rates, just as any population increase, a study shows that the increase is minimal.
The Trump campaign plans to conduct a “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants to lower housing costs. But, according to economists, this plan would likely increase housing costs instead of lowering them. A report by Mother Jones notes that Trump’s deportation plans may “grind the construction of new housing to a halt,” since 1.4 million undocumented workers work in construction, making up “more than 10 percent of the entire labor force, and 32 percent of roofers.”
The Trump campaign claims undocumented immigrants will bankrupt Medicare and Social Security
At nearly every campaign stop, Trump claims that undocumented immigrants will drain resources from Medicare and Social Security.
At a Pennsylvania rally on August 17, Trump said “[Harris is] going to destroy your Medicare. She’s going to destroy your Social Security. First, she has thrown open our borders. Second, she is flooding our country with millions and millions of low-wage migrants and giving them welfare, free health care, food stamps, public benefits…. She wants to make them citizens, dumping them onto Medicare and dumping them into your beautiful Social Security program.”
The GOP has also included this claim in its official 2024 platform, which reads, “Republicans will protect Medicare’s finances from being financially crushed by the Democrat plan to add tens of millions of new illegal immigrants to the rolls of Medicare. We vow to strengthen Medicare for future generations.”
Studies show, however, that immigrants boost Medicare and Social Security by contributing more tax dollars than they receive in benefits from the two programs.
A 2013 study, for example, found that in 2009, immigrants made 14.7 percent of all contributions to Medicare that year while only accounting for 7.9 percent of the program’s expenditures, resulting in a surplus of nearly $14 billion. That same year, people born in the US generated a deficit of $30.9 billion. (Undocumented immigrants are not able to enroll in Medicare.)
Immigrants have a similar effect on the Social Security budget because they increase the ratio of workers paying into the system to retirees benefiting from it. (Undocumented immigrants cannot recieve social security benefits.)
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for taking jobs from American citizens
Another popular Trump refrain is that undocumented immigrants are taking jobs from American citizens. In a September speech to the Economic Club of New York, he claimed that “100% of the jobs created under [Biden’s] administration have gone to illegal migrants that came into our country.”
According to reporting by Forbes, this is false. Since Biden took office, the number of U.S.-born people in the workforce has increased by 6%, and the number of foreign-born workers has increased by 22%. Under Trump, both workforce populations decreased, by 1.4%and 1.6%respectively.
As Popular Information has previously reported, undocumented immigrants in the US workforce mean more jobs for American citizens. If Trump is elected and carries out his plan for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, U.S.-born citizens can expect their job opportunities to shrink. One study on the economic impacts of deportation found that for every 1 million immigrants deported between 2008 and 2014, 88,000 American workers lost jobs. Without undocumented immigrants, the American economy’s current labor shortage would be even worse.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for smuggling Fentanyl
At a July rally, Trump claimed “We’re losing 300,000 people a year to fentanyl that comes through our border.” Vance parrotted this claim at the vice presidential debate last week, saying, “Kamala Harris let in fentanyl into our communities at record levels.”
However, it is largely American citizens who are responsible for bringing fentanyl into the country. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 86.2 percent of fentanyl trafficking offenders in 2021 were U.S. citizens.
Trump’s claim that fentanyl is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans a year is also exaggerated. The total number of annual drug overdoses is between 100,000 and 110,000, while the number of opioid overdoses (which includes, but is not limited to, fentanyl deaths) is about 81,000.
The Trump campaign blames undocumented immigrants for inflation
Undocumented immigrants are also responsible for inflation, according to Trump. In July, he told supporters at a Michigan rally that “another key driver of inflation is the migrant invasion Kamala Harris has created on our southern border.”
A study by the Peterson Institute for International Economics found that if Trump succeeded in deporting 7.5 million workers over a two-year period, inflation would be 7.4 percent higher than if the mass deportation plan was not enacted because the deportation would worsen existing labor shortages and decrease production. If Trump deported 1.3 million workers, inflation would be 1.3 percent higher.
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