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We verify what Biden has said about Latinos and immigration

2020-12-02T15:44:20.066Z


The president-elect assured during the campaign that the Obama administration did not separate immigrant families, he also said that Latinos are a diverse community. That's how it is?


New government, new expectations.

The Latino population in the United States is hopeful that the promises that President-elect Joe Biden made during the race for the White House will be fulfilled, and the immigration issue is one of the issues that attracts the most attention.

Biden has described as "ridiculous" the immigration policies implemented by the still president, Donald Trump, and has promised to amend many of them.

So far, at least in word, he has expressed his affection for Latinos, whom he calls "the future of America."

Days ago, he appointed several Hispanics to high positions on his team in the White House, and selected the first Latino and immigrant, Alejandro Mayorkas, to head the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

During the presidential campaign, Biden spoke multiple times about immigration and the Latino community.

We took on the task, with the help of the Politifact organization, to compile some of their claims and verify their veracity.

Here are some of those verifications.  

  • "The Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly diverse attitudes about different things."

Biden said these words in August in an interview with the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) and the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ).

This interview earned him some criticism for the way he compared the diversity between the black and Latino communities.

“The Latino community is an incredibly diverse community, with incredibly different attitudes about different things.

If you go to Florida, you find in certain places a very different attitude about immigration than you do when you are in Arizona.

So it's a very different community, very diverse, ”Biden said.

That the Latino community is diverse, as he said, is true.

“The Hispanic population in the United States is far from being monolithic.

Altogether, those who identify as Hispanic or Latino have immigrated or are of ancestry from more than 20 countries and territories, speak more than six different languages ​​and belong to the entire socioeconomic spectrum, ”wrote in 2014 several researchers led by physician Abraham Aragonés. from the Department of Psychiatry at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Hospital.

This diversity of culture and historical circumstances is also manifested in the presidential elections.

The Latino vote is not a homogeneous bloc.

Much of the Venezuelans and Cubans in South Florida favored Trump, while, in Arizona, the Latino vote was key for the traditionally republican state to end up dyeing blue in favor of Joe Biden.

[The stock market set a record and Trump took credit for it.

Was it thanks to him?]

“The 60.6 million Americans grouped under the umbrella term 'Latino' are a racially, ethnically, and geographically diverse group.

And they have equally diverse political views, ”wrote Lisa García Bedolla, Vice Chancellor for Graduate Studies at the University of Berkeley.

  • "24 out of 100 children in school speak Spanish today"

During the presidential campaign, in a meeting with Puerto Ricans in Kissimmee, Florida, Biden praised the contributions of Hispanics in America, and cited a statistic on Spanish-speaking children.

"24 out of 100 children in school speak Spanish today," he said during an interview with Telemundo.

Biden's campaign website says that a quarter of children in public schools are Latino, and the candidate has also said that about a quarter of students speak Spanish.

The statement that 1 in 4 children in the country are Latino is true, but your specific statement about the number of Spanish speakers lacks context, because not all Latino children speak Spanish and the estimates vary according to various sources.

In the United States, about 17% of all public school students speak Spanish, said Jeffrey Passel, lead demographer and immigration expert at the Pew Research Center.

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Pew researchers analyzed the same 2018 data for Florida only, and found that there, about 24% of public school students speak Spanish at home and the majority of those students are Hispanic.

Data from the State Department of Education for the 2019-20 school year showed that about 20% of public school students speak Spanish as their first language.

Not all Hispanic youth speak Spanish.

The 2016 Pew National Survey of Latinos found that use of English is increasing among Hispanic youth.

At that time, 6 out of 10 said they use Spanish.

  • "The Affordable Care Act granted health insurance to 4 million Hispanics in this country"

During a meeting with Latino supporters in Miami on October 5, 2020, Biden said that the Affordable Care Act, known as Obamacare, allowed 4 million Hispanics to have health coverage.

Although we don't know where Biden got that number from, it

may be an understatement

.

According to a study published in December 2016 by the Urban Institute, between 2010 - when Obamacare was approved - and 2015, 19.2 million people achieved health coverage.

Of these, 6.2 million (32%) were Hispanic.

In fact, Latinos are the group that benefited the most from this law.

The percentage of uninsured Latinos fell 7.1% after the major Obamacare reforms went into effect in 2014.

In total, the rate of Hispanics without health coverage fell from 32.6% to 19.1% between 2010 and 2016, according to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

  • "Hispanic families are responsible today for 2.6 billion dollars of our Gross Domestic Product, and they are growing"

Also in Miami, during his meeting with the Latino community on October 5, Biden assured that Hispanic families are currently responsible for 2.6 billion dollars of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the United States.

That's true.

The figure comes from a report published on September 24, 2020 by the Latino Donor Collaborative, and prepared by economists from the Center for Research and Economic Forecasting (CERF) and the Center for the Study of Health and Latino Culture of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

The researchers found that the Latin American Gross Domestic Product increased from 1.7 trillion dollars in 2010 to 2.6 trillion dollars in 2018. Among other findings, it stands out that being only 18.3% of the US population, the Latinos are responsible for 78% of the growth of the nation's workforce since the Great Recession.

This report was also cited by the Joint Economic Committee of the United States Congress in a report on the state of the economy of the Hispanic community.

"With more equitable investments and more inclusive economic policies, upward mobility would increase and Hispanic Americans could further drive our economic recovery and help create a more resilient nation," the congressional document states.

  • “His children were ripped from his arms and separated.

    And now they can't

    find more than 500 of these parents.

    Those children are alone "

Biden referred during the last presidential debate to the zero tolerance policy, implemented by the Trump Administration in 2018, and that separated thousands of migrant children from their families at the border.

“His children were ripped from his arms and separated.

And now they can't find more than 500 of these parents.

Those children are alone.

With nowhere to go

It's criminal, ”Biden noted Oct. 22.

[Cecilia Muñoz, the Hispanic woman activists don't want on Biden's team]

What the Democratic candidate said is true.

At the time, attorneys appointed to identify the migrant families who were separated had not yet located the parents of 545 children, and about two-thirds of those parents were deported without their children, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. 

A court ordered the government to end the zero tolerance policy, but there are reports that hundreds of minors were separated from their families after that ruling.

  • "Latino unemployment jumped to over 37%"

On June 5, during a speech on the nation's economy, Biden twice stated that Hispanic unemployment had risen.

"Latino unemployment went up to more than 37%," Biden said.

His claim at the time was false.

The report showed that Hispanic unemployment decreased, not increased.

What is correct is that Latino youth unemployment increased by 37%, which is not the same as Hispanic unemployment had increased, as Biden said twice during his speech.

According to the report, in May the unemployment of Hispanics or Latinos fell from 16.7% to 15.1% while the unemployment rate of Hispanic youth increased from 35.8% to 37.4%.

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  • "The last two administrations deported twice as many people as we deported, twice"

Joe Biden said on February 14 that the governments of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton registered twice as many deportations as the administration of Barack Obama, when he was vice president. 

This is misleading. 

While it is true that the number of people returned to their countries based on returns at the border and formal expulsion orders was at least double with Bush and Clinton;

the number of deportations based solely on formal expulsions were higher under Obama.

Biden is wrong if he only looks at the number of people deported under a removal order, a formal process that can involve a court order. 

The Immigration Policy Institute released a report in January 2017 on the immigration enforcement records of Obama, Bush, and Clinton.

The group compiled data from the Department of Homeland Security, which accounted for about 5.3 million deportations during the Obama Administration, about 10.3 million under Bush and about 12.3 million under Clinton.

Those numbers, in reality, are the sum of expulsions and returns from the borders.

  • "It is the first time that asylum seekers have to make their application from a third country"

"This is the first time they have had to seek asylum in a third country. It's outrageous. It's outrageous. It's wrong," Biden said when asked in August about asylum seekers in camps in Mexico. 

What Biden says is true, but context is lacking.

The policy known as Remain in Mexico has led thousands of immigrants to establish temporary camps in border cities of that country once they applied for asylum in the United States. 

[Biden elects women and minorities to lead a diverse government that "looks like America"]

Experts say there is no precedent for the transfer of people out of the country after initiating an asylum application.

In this context, Mexico is the safe third country.

However, people are not sent to the neighboring country to request asylum there, but to await a decision on their case in the US. 

In 2002, the United States and Canada signed a safe third country agreement.

A key difference between that George W. Bush-era agreement and the Trump program to stay in Mexico is that, under the 2002 agreement, people seeking asylum in the United States were not sent to Canada while the United States case. States was processed.

  • "We don't lock people in cages. We don't separate families."

While it is true that Trump's immigration policies are different, it is false to say that during the Obama Administration there were no arrests of immigrants in pitiful precincts, as Biden said in September last year. 

"We didn't put people in cages. We didn't separate families. We didn't do all of those things," he said. 

Critics of Trump's zero tolerance policy, which led to family separations, circulated a photo showing children face down on the floor of a compound, with chains, during Trump's term.

However, the photo was from 2014, when Obama was president. 

Jeh Johnson, former Secretary of Homeland Security with Obama, has acknowledged in interviews with the media that some children ended up in those precincts in the past government.

By law, children have to be transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services within 72 hours.

"But during that 72-hour period sometimes the number of children you can have in the infrastructure quadruples and you have to find places to put the children quickly. You cannot leave 7-year-olds on the streets of McAllen or El Paso. So these facilities were built, which I think was a large warehouse, and these chain walls were put in place to be able to separate the women from the men, and the children from the adults, until they are released or transferred to HHS. Is it ideal? Of course not, "Johnson said.

[Trump falsely claims that in certain states there were more votes than voters]

  • "Our economy is in tatters, with Black, Latino, Asian descent, and Native American communities hit the hardest."

Biden made this assertion when accepting the presidential nomination last August, referring to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

Since the pandemic began, jobless numbers have reached highs not seen since the Great Depression.

The unemployment rate for black people in July was 14.6%, for Hispanics 12.9% and for people of Asian descent 12.2%.

As Biden said, the unemployment rate for whites was significantly lower than for the other groups, set at 9.2%.

There are no comparable data for Native Americans.

However, a related statistic showing the proportion of the workforce reflects a similar pattern.

Data compiled by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis's Center for the Development of Indigenous Countries determines that the employment-to-population ratio of Native Americans has consistently lagged that of black and white people since the beginning of the pandemic.

This article was prepared thanks to the FactChat agreement, coordinated by the 

International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN)

 with the support of WhatsApp.

The objective of the project is to bring better information in Spanish during the US presidential elections in 2020.

This and other political checks can be received directly by WhatsApp 

by clicking here

 or by registering the number +1 727-477-2212 and write "Hello" in the first message. 

We will wait for you.

#Chatbot

Source: telemundo

All news articles on 2020-12-02

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