In the run-up to the 2024 election, Donald Trump promised, We will close the border. We will stop the invasion of illegals into our country. A year later, it was a promisehe claimed to have kept. But exactly who are the illegals? Loose definitions and manipulated statistics tell a very misleading story about migrants from Latin America.
By John Perry
Earlier this year, a chart appeared onsocialmedia siteslike X claiming that during President Biden's four years in office, 8% of Nicaragua's population entered the US illegally. The chart displayed comparable percentages for five other Latin American countries Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Venezuela and Guatemala.It appeared to confirm Trumps claims that Bidens open border policies had attracted people in such huge numbers that their countries had lost significant proportions of their populations.
Source: Pallesens chart, since deleted but found in various posts on Facebook and X.
The chart in question, with 4.6 million views on X, was the work of data scientist Jonatan Pallesen, so it might have been considered statistically accurate. Lets look at how it was produced.
Pallesen used publicly available data from US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) showing numbers of CBP "encounters" with people entering the country. An encounter can refer to a person who crossed the border unlawfully or who claimed asylum at a border post. But it can also refer to someone who arrived at the border and was turned away by officials, failing to enter the US at all. Furthermore, someone making repeated attempts to enter the country may have several encounters and be separately logged each time by CBP officials.
CBP statistics, therefore cannot be used to show the number of people making illegal entries because they have a significant but unknown element of double counting.
For his chart, Pallesen also added in the half-million people who traveled to the US under a Biden-era parole program that applied to four of the six countries. This raised two further problems. One is that, by definition, these entrants to the US were at the time perfectly legal. But, more importantly, the CBP had already included these entries in their data showing encounters. So there was an additional, even bigger element of double-counting in Pallesens chart.
It is not surprising that Pallesen ended up with huge figures for "illegal entries over the years in question (2021-24). He must have decided that they would seem even more dramatic if they were expressed as a percentage of each countrys population. This pushed Nicaragua to the top of the chart, whereas in terms of actual numbers of encounters, it would be at the bottom.
PallesensX accountreveals his motivation in posting such patently bogus data. His screeds are full of anti-immigrant talking points. He has published articles jointly with academicscriticized aseugenicists, or scientific racists"whose workis being appropriated in the service of alt right and White nationalist ideas.
The chart may be wildly wrong, but it has served its purpose in feeding an anti-immigrant message. Indeed, it has been reproduced many times, including by Donald Trump Jr whosaid Pallesen's chartshowed Bidens policies to have been absolute insanity.
In April, Pallesens work was examined bythe rumor fact-check site Snopes. Analyst Jack Izzo described it as meaningless and the chart as full of flaws. Expressing the numbers as percentages of each countrys population is the equivalent of dividing apples by oranges, he added. The chart has been withdrawn, but Snopes found plentiful examples of it still being used.
The political misuse of data like Pallesens is not confined to anti-immigrant nationalists. Similar exaggerated claims are used to criticize the governments of three of the countries from which the migrants originate.
Lets look first at Nicaragua. An NGO based in Costa Ricaclaimsthat an even higher proportion of Nicaraguas population 11.6%, equivalent to 800,000 people left the country over the period 2018-2025. This NGO has receivedover $282,000in US federal grants to create anti-Nicaragua propaganda, so naturally it attributes this exodus to the governments systematic repression.
Prominent opposition figure Manuel Orozco goes further,accusing Nicaraguaof the expulsion of almost a million people between 2018 and 2024 a startling 15% of the population. As well as emigrants to the US, these figures include a substantial number said to have fled to Costa Rica where 300,000 Nicaraguans haveclaimed asylum.
The absurdity of these claims in Nicaraguas case can be demonstrated by simple analysis of the countrys population figures, available in theUN data portal. In 2018, its resident population was 6.4 million; over the period 2018-25, the natural population growth (births minus deaths) was 790,000, so without migration the 2025 population would have been 7.2 million. In fact, it was around 180,000190,000 below that figure, at just over 7 million. The balance is explained by net migration (the difference between people leaving and people entering): at around 180,000190,000, it was just 3% of the population over a longer period, 2018-25.
The real loss of population is therefore much less than half of Pallesens percentage and far below the figures claimed by opposition pundits. Apart from double counting, the main reason for this huge discrepancy is that large numbers of Nicaraguans return home. They do not stay permanently in either the US or Costa Rica. While data for people leaving the US (for example, around 10,000have been deportedby Trump) are only partial, UN figures show that migration to Costa Rica iscircularas many Nicaraguans leave as enter on a weekly basis.
Another of Pallesens claims is that over one million Venezuelans entered the US illegally in the four years 2021-25. Writing in the Anti-Empire Project, Joe Emersberger and Justin Podurexaminea range of estimates for Venezuelan emigration, including aBBC estimatethat over seven million have emigrated since 2015. Theyconclude thatnobody should accept the migration figures for Venezuela that the western media constantly cites. They quote a typical US media figure assayingthat the misery and repression that Venezuela has suffered at the hands of Maduros dictatorship has caused millions to flee. Yetanalysisby the Centre for Economic and Policy Research shows that four million Venezuelans have emigrated as a direct result of US policy in the form of sanctions unilateral coercive measures imposed by the US and its allies.
Pallesen also suggests that over 800,000 illegal entrants to the US since 2021 came from Cuba. Scrutiny of the data suggests that in the period 2021-24 some 600,000 Cubansattempted to enter the US, and many of these will be double-counted or have made failed attempts. However, Cubas case is somewhat different because it is not the scale but the reasons for migration that are disputed. Cuban government officials accept analyses by experts such as Juan Carlos Albizu-Campos Espieira of the University of Havana, whoassessesCubas population loss since the end of 2020 at 10.1 per cent. The primary driver is arguably the enormous damage caused by the six-decade US blockade of the country. Yet academic commentators outside Cuba, such asAgustina Rodrguez Granja, blame migration entirely on the governments economic mismanagement and on political repression.
The real picture then is that migration from Nicaragua is minimal, once returnees are taken into account. In the case of both Venezuela and Cuba, outward migration is very significant, but it is driven by hostile policies pursued by successive US administrations, including Trumps.
As is clear from his background, Pallesens exaggerated claims about illegal entrants to the US and their repetition in social media come from anti-immigrant or White supremacist sentiments. Writing inBlack Agenda Report, Margaret Kimberley points out that Trumps immigration enforcement is a doomed attempt to make America whiter again. Accepting handfuls of refugees appears to be acceptable, she adds, if they are White people escaping South Africa.
Similar claims to Pallesens from opponents of socialist governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba have different political perspectives, although there may be some degree of overlap. Their attacks on their own countries of origin feed Trumps narrative about excessive numbers of Latino immigrants in the US. In the case of one of the most prominent opponents of socialist governments, Venezuelan Maria Corina Machado, her support for Trumps policies wasunconditionaleven when he was illegally deporting her compatriots to prisons in El Salvador.
Migration as an issue has been deeply weaponized. Alarmism about the number of migrants who have arrived in the US from Latin American countries has brought together two previously distinct elements of right-wing politics. Both are purveying myths, not facts, and it is important to challenge them.
John Perry lives in Masaya, Nicaragua, where, perplexingly, he writes and edits books on British housing and social policy.
Pressenza New York
