Today's Immigrants, Yesterday's 'Welfare Queen'

In the second Republican presidential debate, Donald Trump made the following statement about the 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S.: “So, we have a country of laws, they’re going to go out, and they’ll come back if they deserve to come back.”

Trump has appointed himself arbiter of what immigrants do and don’t deserve, and he enjoys the support of an audience that takes his words seriously. According to this presidential hopeful, unauthorized immigrants from Mexico—the “bad ones,” as he calls them—cause crime, burden the system, and give birth to “anchor babies” just to keep mooching off the government. These inflated and inaccurate claims feed into a broader national narrative that casts immigration, as a whole, in a problematic light.