Trump flusters Democrats, media with factual statement about the border problems

Michael Barone:

The televised presidential address from the Oval Office, a staple of communication between the chief executive and the people in the second half of 20th century, has recently been in desuetude. Former President Barack Obama delivered only three such addresses in his eight years in office. President Donald Trump this week delivered his first one, just days short of completing half his term.

It was a sober address, short but touching some emotive chords, carefully based on facts and proposals -- contrary to the Democrats' meme that it would be based on fears, not facts.

Post-speech fact-checking was particularly farcical. The Washington Post said Trump's claim that ICE officers made "266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records" in two years is accurate but "misleading" because the number includes all crimes. Huh?

Another complaint is that Trump claimed 1 in 3 women in migrant caravans is sexually assaulted. The complainer pointed to a study that says it is 60 to 80 percent of those women. Obviously, nobody knows the actual numbers; a good guess might be "a lot." But it is pretty obvious what's been happening on the southern border.

Attempted border crossings were way down in 2017, presumably for fear of tough Trump enforcement. They rose in 2018, as many Central Americans started arriving with children, hoping to gain entry into the United States by exploiting court-created loopholes in American asylum law. Few had legitimate claims on the political persecution or other traditional grounds for asylum; many complained of high local crime rates, for which, so far as I know, no nation has ever granted asylum.

Now it may be objected that the number of illegal southern border crossings was much higher 15 and 20 years ago. That's why Congress, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, voted in 2006 for more border protection.

And it's possible to argue that in the current hot labor market, illegals have little depressing effect on wages, and that the numbers of violent crimes by illegals, though regrettable, are bearable in a nation of 328 million. Democrats understandably tend to shun these valid but hard-hearted arguments.

Instead they insist vehemently that a wall, which many supported a dozen years ago, will inevitably be ineffective and must be regarded as "immoral."

This first argument flies in the face of evidence. As American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin pointed out in 2017, Israel's wall with the West Bank, Morocco's with Algeria, India's with Bangladesh, Hungary's with Serbia and others have reduced illegal crossings to near zero. This year, Rubin reports that France, Iraq, Lithuania, Estonia and Norway are putting up walls. "[I]t is simply counterfactual to suggest that walls won't work, a willful subordination of facts to the politics of the day," he writes.
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The Pelosi and Schumer "rebuttal" was so dismal that someone at Twitter decided to censor the picture of the two as containing "sensitive" information.   That was probably because so many users were mocking their presentation and appearance.  As noted previously the so-called fact checkers also had a dismal showing in attempting to discredit what Trump was saying.

The bottom line is that the Democrat's arguments against the wall range from weak to nonsensical.  That is because they are based more on their political animous toward Trump and his supporters than logic and reason.