Immigration debates in the United States rarely fail for lack of passion. They fail because a handful of persistent myths flatten a complex reality into slogans that feel intuitive but do not survive contact with data. The result is a public conversation that swings between panic and denial, with very little room for the truth that is harder, less satisfying, and far more useful.
One reason these myths endure is that immigration is not one phenomenon. It is family reunification and high-skilled hiring. It is refugees and students. It is seasonal work and long-settled communities. It is lawful admissions, unauthorized presence, and legal limbo created by backlogs and policy changes. A single word is doing the work of a dozen categories, and that ambiguity makes misinformation easy.
What follows is not an argument for or against any particular policy. It is an attempt to replace the most common myths with what credible research and primary-source analysis actually suggest.
Myth: Most immigrants are “illegal border crossers”
This myth persists because the border is visually and politically dramatic and because television coverage naturally focuses on the most photogenic and urgent moments. But “unauthorized immigrant” is a status, not a route. Some people enter unlawfully, and others enter legally and later fall out of status due to expired visas, changing eligibility, or administrative complications.
Recent research underscores that the unauthorized population is not a simple border-only story. Pew Research Center estimated the unauthorized immigrant population reached 14 million in 2023, and its methodology discussion highlights how changes in legal admissions, enforcement, and policy pathways affect these numbers over time.
Independent immigration researchers have also emphasized that visa overstays are a substantial share of the undocumented population. The Center for Migration Studies has noted that a significant portion of undocumented residents are people who overstayed visas, not people who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border unlawfully.
None of this minimizes the border. It simply corrects the mental model. If you think “unauthorized” means “border crossing,” you will reach for solutions that miss a major part of the picture.
Myth: The legal immigration system is basically open and uncontrolled
Another common misunderstanding is that legal immigration is a wide-open gate and that unlawful entry is the only “real” enforcement issue. In reality, the lawful system is heavily structured, quota-based, and often slow to the point of dysfunction.
The Migration Policy Institute’s explainer makes the architecture clear: permanent immigration is organized around family relationships, employer sponsorship, and humanitarian protection, with numerical caps and per-country limits that create long waits in many categories.
When lawful channels are narrow, backlogged, or mismatched to labor demand and family realities, people do not stop moving. They move into gray zones. They overstay. They cycle through temporary statuses. They wait in limbo. When the system cannot process human demand at human speed, the system manufactures “illegality” as an outcome.
This is one reason a serious immigration conversation cannot be reduced to a border-only argument. The structure of legal pathways, including caps and backlogs, is a key driver of the outcomes people later moralize.
Myth: Immigrants drive crime and make communities less safe
Few claims travel faster than the crime myth because it plays on fear and because isolated tragedies can be generalized into a narrative. But when researchers look at crime systematically, the results consistently undermine the stereotype.
A peer-reviewed study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compared crime rates between undocumented immigrants, legal immigrants, and native-born citizens using Texas data, which is unusually detailed for this question. It found considerably lower felony arrest rates among undocumented immigrants compared to native-born citizens.
Cato Institute researchers, using incarceration data, similarly reported lower incarceration rates for both unauthorized and lawful immigrants than for native-born Americans.
There are limits to any single dataset, and responsible researchers acknowledge them. But the direction across studies is remarkably consistent: immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, do not appear to commit crimes at higher rates than native-born citizens, and in many analyses they commit them at lower rates. When “immigration equals crime” becomes a default assumption, it is not evidence speaking. It is narrative inertia.
Myth: Immigrants “take jobs” and broadly depress wages
This is a powerful myth because it feels like basic supply and demand. Add workers, and wages fall. The problem is that labor markets are not a single bucket of identical workers. Workers specialize. Businesses expand when labor is available. Immigrants and native-born workers often complement rather than perfectly substitute for one another.
There is substantial research on wage effects, and the mainstream conclusion is more nuanced than the myth. Economist Giovanni Peri’s review for IZA’s World of Labor concluded that immigration has very small effects on average native wages and that there is little evidence of large wage suppression for less-educated native workers as a general rule.
Meta-analytic work that reviews many studies often finds small average effects, with some variation by time, place, and subgroup. A recent meta-analysis surveying dozens of studies reported negligible effects on native wages overall while noting that impacts can differ depending on context.
Even where localized impacts exist, it is a mistake to treat the labor market as a zero-sum pie. The same economy that absorbs immigrant labor also generates demand for goods and services, and immigrants themselves are consumers, renters, and taxpayers. “They take jobs” is a slogan that ignores how economies grow and adjust.
A more honest framing is that immigration can create winners and losers in specific sectors and moments, which is why labor standards, wage enforcement, and worker bargaining power matter. Blaming immigrants for wage stagnation often functions as an evasion of deeper causes like declining union density, market concentration, and employer leverage.
Myth: Immigrants are a net drain who do not pay their way
This myth is tricky because government budgets are complicated and because costs are visible while benefits are diffuse. A child in a classroom is visible. Payroll taxes flowing quietly into federal trust funds are not.
The most comprehensive synthesis of the economics is the National Academies’ major report on the economic and fiscal consequences of immigration, which reviews decades of research on wages, growth, and public finances. It finds that impacts vary across federal, state, and local budgets and across generations, and it emphasizes that second-generation immigrants often show strong positive fiscal contributions.
This is the pattern that simplistic “drain” arguments miss. Some costs, such as education, are borne locally and upfront. Many benefits, such as long-run tax contributions, show up later and are often captured at different levels of government. Immigration’s fiscal picture cannot be honestly summarized with a single angry sentence.
On the specific claim that undocumented immigrants do not pay taxes, independent policy analysis contradicts it. The Tax Policy Center notes that many immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, pay taxes and that undocumented workers often have payroll taxes withheld even though they are not eligible for many of the benefits those taxes support.
The American Immigration Council has also documented how Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers allow people without Social Security numbers, including many undocumented immigrants, to file taxes and contribute to the tax base.
That does not end every fiscal debate. It simply removes a false premise. You cannot argue honestly about costs and benefits if you start by asserting that millions of people contribute nothing.
Myth: Noncitizens are voting in large numbers
This claim resurfaces regularly because it is politically useful, not because evidence supports it. It is also a claim that invites a basic clarification. Noncitizens are barred from voting in federal elections, and illegal voting is a crime.
The more important point is empirical. The Migration Policy Institute’s explainer on noncitizen voting states that it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal or state elections and that there is no evidence of voting by unauthorized immigrants or other noncitizens in significant numbers, with audits and studies generally finding such cases to be rare.
When this myth dominates, it often acts as a proxy for something else: a broader anxiety about demographic change, political power, and cultural status. Those anxieties are real political forces, but laundering them through a false claim about widespread illegal voting does not produce good policy. It produces suspicion without proportion.
Myth: Immigration is mainly a problem of “bad people” rather than system design
The most corrosive myth is the one that turns immigration into a moral sorting mechanism: “good” immigrants who deserve to stay and “bad” immigrants who deserve removal, with the border as the only gatekeeper. This framing is emotionally satisfying, but it obscures how much “illegality” is produced by statutes, caps, delays, and status rules that often do not match real life.
When legal channels are backlogged, people wait in limbo. When temporary statuses are fragile, people fall out of status even when they are working, paying taxes, and raising families. When humanitarian systems are overwhelmed, people spend years in administrative uncertainty.
That is not an argument for permissiveness. It is an argument for clarity. If a system routinely produces large populations who live and work inside the economy while lacking stable status, the question is not only “Why did they do that?” The question is also, “Why did we build a system that predictably yields that outcome?”
MPI’s explanation of the legal immigration system is useful here because it shows how much of immigration is governed by category design, caps, and per-country limits rather than a simple “yes or no” gate.
A better way to think about immigration myths
Immigration is one of those issues where people want the comfort of a single lever. Close the border, fix the problem. Deport everyone; fix the problem. Legalize everyone; fix the problem. The reality is that immigration is intertwined with labor demand, family formation, humanitarian crises, and a legal system built from compromises that often collide with modern conditions.
The evidence does not demand a single political conclusion. But it does demand intellectual honesty. It demands retiring myths that are demonstrably wrong and replacing them with questions that can be answered.
How should a quota-based system respond to long backlogs?
What labor needs exist, and how should worker protections be enforced regardless of status?
How do we balance local costs with long-run benefits across generations?
How do we preserve public safety without indulging false crime narratives?
How do we keep democratic debates grounded in facts rather than recycled claims about mass illegal voting?
If the goal is policy that works, myths are not just wrong. They are expensive. They steer attention toward spectacle and away from design, away from data, and away from the slow, unglamorous work of building an immigration system that matches reality.
—Greg Collier
