The American Fabric: Truths & Lies

Extremists have always used disinformation and fear-mongering to further their cause. But their rhetoric about immigration has stooped to new lows in recent months.

Some of the lies are so outrageous it might be tempting to laugh. Haitian immigrants, for example, are not eating their neighbors’ pets in Springfield Ohio. And 107% of American jobs have not been taken by “illegal aliens,” as Trump claimed. (107 percent? How would that even work?)

But the misinformation is no laughing matter. It’s having real effects on people around the country. In Springfield, for example, schools have been closing because of bomb threats. Every time the rhetoric goes up, violence goes up with it.

Then there’s misinformation that feels less absurd but is still absolutely incorrect. The idea that immigrants commit more crimes than native-born Americans, for example, is widely believed by many despite every statistic and research study proving the exact opposite. And economists have shown that immigrants aren’t “stealing jobs.” Again, the opposite is true: immigration strengthens our economy and creates jobs for both native-born Americans and immigrants.

On today’s episode of The American Fabric, we’re busting myths and tackling the fear-mongering head on.

Don’t miss our last episode tomorrow!

Learn more about our guests:
Lt. Colonel (retired) Alexander Vindman
Congresswoman Delia Ramirez
Dr. Andrea Bonior, psychologist and professor
Dr. Sara Sadhwani, professor of politics and immigration
Sonal Jain, owner of Chamak Dhamak in Akron OH

Transcript

The American Fabric
Episode 2: Truths & Lies

Narrator: Hi, I’m Rachel Vindman. Welcome back to The American Fabric, a special 3-episode series about immigration. 

Today we’re looking at some of the myths and disinformation about immigrants, from crime to the economy to our election process. Extremists want us to be afraid of immigrants, and they want to terrify suburban women in particular. Remember Senator Katie Britt’s response to the State of the Union?

Katie Britt: From fentanyl poisonings to horrific murders, there are empty chairs tonight at kitchen tables just like this one because of President Biden's senseless border policies.

Narrator: So… why suburban women?

Dr. Andrea: Suburban women represent, as a lot of politicians probably see it, sort of the heart of the American family.

Narrator: That’s Dr. Andrea Bonior, a psychologist and the author of the long-running Washington Post column “Baggage Check.”

Dr. Andrea: And so if we can get to them and shake their worldview, that's where the power is because they influence their children's views and we can sort of get in there and have them raise their children with this. They literally influence their children's behavior on a daily basis. And suburban women even who aren't moms kind of represent maybe in this way this kind of idealized, you know, hey, they're they're reaching higher educational attainment levels now than some men. They have just more purchasing power. They're forced to be reckoned with, right? 

And they're also, I think, in a way, expected to respond to these messages in a way that does make them talk to other people, that does make them actually, you know, you know, gather and talk about this and march and picket and make decisions for their families. You know, “let's go to the school board. Let's do this.” I think there's an agency that is ironically recognized in suburban women where they can get stuff done. If you get, if you get the message that resonates, right, I think people respond to that in such a way. 

Also, I think it's probably that, you know, women are expected to be very nurturing and compassionate in a way. So if you, you know, if you speak to that, if you threaten that somebody is harming people, somebody is damaging and creating a threat to everything you care about, that resonates, because women can be very community minded, very nurturing. And I think, you know, as a voting block, they're a force to be reckoned with as, as we know, and I think, you know, when you get in there, it's just, it's just tough to watch it in real time to watch some of these corroded messages start to spread precisely because women are trying to develop a sense of community and a sense of safety for their family, and I think that gets exploited for that very reason.

Narrator: So let’s get down to the facts. Is there a border crisis in this country?

Well, yes and no. The number of immigrants and asylum-seekers at our southern border did hit a historic high in December of 2023. But after Biden issued a presidential proclamation in June of this year to limit the number of migrants allowed in, that dropped by almost 30 percent.

But the numbers don’t tell the whole story. The types of immigrants at the border have changed significantly too - in the 80s and 90s, migrants arriving at the border were mostly single men looking for work. 

Now, there are more families and refugees seeking asylum than ever before. That does create a strain on our social support systems, but it also calls to our values. It’s right there on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

But there’s so much disinformation about immigration out there, let’s break it down one myth at a time. What about the idea that “immigrants commit more crimes”? Let’s ask Dr. Sara Sadhwani, professor of politics at Pomona College.

Dr. Sara: That's the myth. Immigrants are more likely to be criminals. Certainly, it's something that we hear Donald Trump talk a whole lot about. 

Trump: Releasing vicious monsters into our communities to rape, maim, and murder. 

Dr. Sara: The opposite is true. Of course, you'll find a handful of stories, that's true anytime, but statistically speaking, immigrants residing in the United States are less likely to be criminals. There was a recent study analyzing 150 years of U.S. census data, and it shows that immigrants have never been incarcerated at a higher rate than U.S. born individuals. So that is simply a false narrative. Of course, we will find some bad actors among the group, but on balance, that is simply not true.

Narrator: Another myth that I can hardly believe we have to address in the year 2024 is about Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio. The lie rose all the way to the presidential debate this month.

Trump: They’re eating the cats and dogs, the people that came in.

Narrator: Again, I can’t believe I have to say this, but Haitians in Ohio are NOT eating their neighbors’ pets. The police chief, the city manager, and every other city official have confirmed that there is absolutely no truth to these disgusting lies.

Last week, JD Vance held up a police report from a woman claiming that her cat was taken by her Haitian neighbors as so-called “proof” of the rumors. But it turns out that the woman's cat was found safe a few days later - hiding in her own basement.

And yet Donald Trump and JD Vance have continued to repeat these lies, despite knowing that they aren’t true. And it’s having real effects on the people of Springfield.

Clip of news about bomb threats to schools

Narrator: The Haitian immigrants in Springfield are there legally and are providing much-needed labor to a city that had been shrinking in population for years. Local factory managers have said they’re grateful to have such hard-working employees to fill their many open positions.  

Speaking of, that’s another myth: immigrants are “taking our jobs.” 

Trump: I hear that Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken. 107 percent of those jobs are taken by illegal aliens.

Narrator: Even if we ignore the dubious math of “107 percent of jobs being taken,” whatever that means, I’m pretty sure that immigrants are not “taking American jobs.” But I wanted to make sure, so I asked an economist: my podcast co-host Amanda Weinstein.

Amanda: So a lot of times I hear that immigrants are coming in and stealing jobs from Americans, and we find that is absolutely not true. We see that as immigration goes up, jobs go up for everyone, for immigrants and native born Americans. We see them creating jobs from the businesses that they are more likely to start. 

And a lot of misconceptions are also about the kind of the paths that immigrants take. What we see is that it's pretty similar over time, whether you're talking about today's immigrants or you're talking about when we were, you know, decades and decades ago, talking about Italian immigrants or Irish immigrants. The story is actually very similar in terms of immigrants moving in, starting businesses and really joining the fabric of American life. And also kind of adding more diversity into America.

Narrator: Congresswoman Delia Ramirez, who we heard from last episode, also had some thoughts about this myth of “immigration is bad for the economy.” And she brought receipts.

Rep. Ramirez: Our economic stability, our economic health is dependent on our ability to welcome immigrants to this country. The reality is that we still have a labor shortage where there are over 9 million job openings at any given time in this country. The reality is that in 2022, 96.7 billion in taxes were paid by immigrants without a work permit, almost 100 billion dollars, of which 39 percent of that went back to pay for US citizens, Social Security and their Medicare and immigrants are not able to access any of the benefits that come from the taxes that they're paying. And that if we legalize immigrants and even bottom line, minimum, at minimum, you gave them work permits. We would be generating another 34 to 45 billion a year in federal and local taxes.

And furthermore, I think it's so important to know this is that, you know, people say, “well, the federal taxes, we don't know where that money goes.” Well, yes, it goes to your social security. Yes, it goes into your schools. Yes, it goes into your infrastructure, but 35 percent of the total taxes that immigrants pay right now go back to state and local municipalities. So that means these are the services that everyday people in the small town in Alabama, in a small, small town like Pikeville, Kentucky, or in the Chicago area are benefiting from. And reality is that for many people who continue to spew anti-immigrant rhetoric, although they too are grandchildren of immigrants, the reason that they have Social Security and that we're able to cover their Social Security and their Medicare and their SNAP benefits is because of immigrants.

And I don't think that we do enough in sharing that narrative. And sharing that story. And it's not a story, there are facts. All you have to do is Google tax breakdowns in every single year and where they're generated from.

Amanda: We know that immigrants are more likely to start a business. So you can probably walk around downtown and you will find businesses started by immigrants. What that also means is we get more variety. We get different ethnic food cuisine restaurants and restaurants and stores that we wouldn't have otherwise. We just get a lot more choices when immigrants start those businesses. 

And some of the reasons why we think immigrants start more businesses is one, it's risky to change the country that you're living in. So coming here was a risk. Starting a business is a risk, right? And what we need are people to start, to take that risk, to start a business. And immigrants are willing to do that.

Narrator: Sonal Jain, the suburban mom from India who we met in the last episode, started her own business in Ohio - but for years, she wasn’t actually allowed to work in this country.

Sonal: I remember just the fifth or sixth day of living here. I was like, let me just at least get out and go, like we used to go out in the evenings and stuff, but I'm like, during the day, I have so much time. Let me just walk around. And so this is like the way I found out that I cannot work in this country was, I was walking and I walked into a motel which was right around the corner from where we lived. And I was like, “Hey, do you have something for me to work?” And he was like, “yeah, here's the forms go fill it up and bring it back. And we can see what we can do.” 

So here I am back home, getting excited for my husband to get back home at 5 PM and I'm like, “Okay. So I did this, I went out for a walk. I was like, I walked into this place and I was like, can you hire me? And they gave me the space. Can you fill it up? And I want to go and work and see if he'll hire me.” And that's when I found out that I couldn't work legally because I was on a dependent visa and that kind of broke me apart. Like, you know, because in India I had my business, coming from a business family. I was part of my family business and I had my own candle business, very, very successful candle making business.  That's when I was like, “Oh, this is also part of something moving into this country.” And that, that was challenging.

Narrator: Years later, after navigating all of the legal hurdles, Sonal started a thriving business selling handcrafts and gifts, contributing to the beauty – and the economy – of Akron Ohio.

Another common myth is that immigrants can vote and it’s destroying our political process. But in reality, it is not legal in any state for a noncitizen to vote in a federal election. 

There are a few places where noncitizens are allowed to vote in certain local elections. For example, San Francisco allows resident noncitizen parents to vote in school board elections. But in those places, they have strict rules in place to ensure that noncitizen voters cannot receive a ballot for state or federal races. 

So how do they verify voters’ citizenship? Not only do all registration forms require you to attest under penalty of perjury that you are a citizen, they also use databases like state DMVs and Social Security to cross-check and catch anyone using false information.

And here’s the thing… it almost never happens. The Heritage Foundation – yeah, the same Heritage Foundation that wrote Project 2025, so you know they’re trying to inflate this fear. They found only 24 instances of noncitizens voting between 2003 and 2023. Only 24 instances. There is no evidence that noncitizens voting has ever been significant enough to impact an election’s outcome. Ever.

In fact, even once they’ve been given the legal right to vote, many immigrant communities are disenfranchised.

Dr. Sara: Most of my research takes a look at in particular Asian American and Latino communities and their voting behavior, their voting patterns. Let's start with who votes and when do they vote. Immigrants so often, even if they naturalize, they become U.S. citizens and register to vote, they, first of all, don't appear on the voter rolls as likely voters. So when we hear polls, for example we often talk about likely voters, people who have voted in the last three election cycles. Well, if you just became a U. S. citizen, you'll never appear on those rolls. So you're never going to get asked your opinion and those likely voters typically are also used by candidates to do outreach and that outreach by candidates often includes how to go vote where to go vote. Don't forget to go vote. So if you're a newly naturalized citizen and you've never voted before, you're probably not going to get a whole lot of communication from campaigns. 

And consistently over the last 20 years, we have seen in survey data, both Latinos and especially Asian Americans reporting high rates that no one has bothered to call them up to, to send a flier to their home, to leave a, you know, to come as a door knocker at their door to tell them about the election that's going on. And that presents a real information gap.

Narrator: Unfortunately, all of the myths and misinformation about immigrants are all too readily believed. So where does this fear and othering come from? Why is it so powerful?

Dr. Andrea: We know that fearful negative messaging spreads much, much, much more quickly on social media. You get more traction. If you have a fearful message, it takes off. People will spread it more. And so if you can base your candidacy upon something that people will, by definition, be more likely to spread and talk about and repost, then you think, you know, Hey, I'm in the money here because people are spreading my message. It does the job. And part of the reason that happens is because I think, again, we are wired to be attuned to threat. That's what kept us alive, you know, for tens of thousands of years. So if something is threatening, it affects our bodies. It affects the way that we actually view our surroundings, and we're going to be more likely to share it.

I also think some of the fear based messaging gives people community in its own way, right? I mean, we see this with conspiracy theories. We see this with people who are incredibly wedded to this identity of, “Hey, it's the other people that are making this country terrible.” They feel a sense of being in it together with other people who believe this, it becomes an identity. I'm part of something, this symbol, this, you know, hat, whatever it might be, this logo, this acronym, this is who I am. And it's something bigger than me. And we all, we all sort of crave that. So ironically, I think in some ways the hateful stuff that goes very much against community because it's turning us away from other people gives some kind of fake sense of community in the sense that we're with people.

And it also, you know, people like the world to make a little bit more sense. So sometimes some of this fear based messaging, it's like, “Oh yeah, well that's the problem.” If we can blame someone, then it's not that the world can be a scary and unpredictable play place. It's more, “well, it's their fault.” And so now the world makes sense again, because it's just these people that are the problem. It's their fault. Because when we do that, we can avoid asking some really hard questions about what we might have had to do with our own problems. 

But also even more importantly, you know, it provides this pat solution, quote unquote, this solution that's not real, but it seems that way. We're, we don't have to do anything else, right? It's like if we blame other people, we're off the hook, aren't we? We don't have to work hard to sort of look at our own lives. And that could be scary and, and make us vulnerable to look at our own lives.

Narrator: But we can choose a different path. Once you realize that we all share the same values, you realize we’re not that different. With just one conversation, someone can turn into our friend or family. Alex and I found that to be true at our wedding in Oklahoma many years ago. 

Rachel: It was your whole family's first time to go to Oklahoma. You'd probably been there like four times before. And it did feel like different cultures, again, even though we’re all white, so we all kind of look the same, but, you know, vastly different backgrounds and different cultures in a lot of ways.

Alex: Well, there's several different things there. I mean, you know, you think about it from the standpoint that like we had a Jewish wedding. In Oklahoma. 

Rachel: It does happen sometimes.

Alex: I know, but still for your family, it was a bit of certainly a new experience. I don't think it was necessarily a culture shock, but it was definitely a new experience. But like that probably was more stark with regards to like my parents’ and your parents’ generation than it was for us. Because, you know, I think that it opened people's eyes to say, this isn't that different. 

Rachel: I think it's, it's part of just having those experiences because a lot of people from your family, I mean, again, they'd never been to Oklahoma and they had a lot of preconceived ideas about Oklahoma, about the Midwest, same with, I think a lot of guests at our wedding. I mean that they had different views of, of Jewish people, to be honest, of immigrants, of all these things. And, you know, it was kind of bringing that together and it's a beautiful thing. 

We need more exchanges like that in our culture. We're in a time where people want to just go to their corners. And I think it's always been like that. It seems very pronounced right now. But it doesn't have to be like this. It doesn't have to be so divisive. We can come together on issues that we agree on. 

Alex: That's not just about immigrants though. I think that's also about ethnicities and races and things of that nature. It's the, it's, it's strangeness and otherness of folks that are different in one way or another. I think once you, you make those kinds of connections and there was something, a substantive interaction or sustained interaction, that really doesn't happen. It's the same thing that, you know why demagogues and kind of nativists and, you know, MAGA can talk about immigrants because they're talking to populations in a lot of cases that don't have those kinds of sustained relationships.

But those kinds of messages don't resonate with people that like, you know, look around their immediate um, circle and see that those threats and fears aren't reflected in their personal relationships, just like crime is like, you know, the crime is rampant in the town over. But things are prospering in your, your town. Your fear is to not let that crime come, come over. Uh, so if you kind of start to think about your own interactions and your own individual relationships, things become less, much less scary. 

Dr. Andrea: I don’t think there’s any doubt that people feel more anxious, more distressed, than in generations past. Even when we’ve had incredible levels of upheaval in past generations in various ways, threats of nuclear war, people going off to war, getting killed in massive numbers, I think there’s a little something different now. And I think it’s in part to do with exposure, and the exposure being so constant and so ever-present. We walk around with, in our pockets is a device that can make us miserable all day. Bad news can be perpetuated just absolutely constantly. And even different than having constant news 24/7 is the constant intensifying of it by other people’s comments, and being in social media bubbles where you see the same thing over and over. And the distortion and the skewing.

You know, I think there’s all kinds of reasons we might be more anxious right now, including reasons like people don’t get as much sleep, as much outdoor time, as much physical activity. We do know from a clinical perspective that that does contribute to anxiety. But I also think being fed a constant diet of distorted and intensified and oversimplified news of what is threatening out in the world, it’s a lot for our systems to handle. And honestly I don’t know if we’re built for that. I don’t know if evolutionarily we are meant to be able to take the onslaught that we’re being exposed to. I don’t think we’re wired that way. And so it’s got us all out of sorts.

Alex: It's about folks that come here and seem like they could be a burden to the U.S., but instead, they revitalize the nation and contribute to its strength. And I think that's the, I think that's a story that sometimes doesn't get translated, that immigrants come here, not because they want to, you know, somehow take that opportunity as a way to survive and draw on social support. They want to, they come here to participate in the American dream. They understand that there is a lot of promise and opportunity here. And they come here to work exceptionally hard, but on a fair playing field to achieve. And this is the story of Americans you know, for hundreds of years. 

If we don't have immigrants come through, continue to come to the US, if we somehow tarnish the promise of of this equality and opportunity that has been extended to folks coming around the world and, you know, folks come here plenty of people have had to face bias and nativism you know, for generations, whether it's Irish in the past or the Italians or Black populations coming from the Caribbean or Africa, all sorts of different, you know, we've had different kinds of immigration flows, the Middle East and so forth. If we don't continue to welcome people here, the economy is just going to grind to a halt. This is an economy that's based on growth and we need to make sure that we continue to invite people here.

Sonal: I would have never thought, all my 25 years of living in India and then coming here, that I would ever have a business where I was able to navigate through things and figure it out, you know. So it's definitely a land of dreams, where dreams come true.

Narrator: Last episode, we heard from Nuvia, the young woman who fled Honduras for a safer life in Virginia. What does she think about all the misinformation about immigrants like her?

Nuvia: I think that they shouldn't generalize that everyone that comes here, it's because they're bad or maybe they have done something bad in their country and they're criminals. We're not criminals. We might be hurt, we might be broken, but we're not criminals.

We shouldn't generalize that everyone is bad, that everyone is mean. Because I can talk for myself and I can say that I'm not bad. I'm not mean. I have great dreams and I think I have a good way to make America great too. 

Narrator: For too long, extremists have “owned” patriotism. They’re the “real Americans.” They know how to “make America great.” 

But I have been so energized lately to see that we’re taking back that narrative. It’s because we love America that we’ve fought so hard for our rights, like control over our own bodies and our children’s right to read. Rights that are on the line right now.

In our final episode, we’ll talk about how politicians have weaponized immigration and how we can all vote with our values in November. Thanks for listening to The American Fabric.