Finding Truth: Who Actually Controls the Border, and What That Means for This Ballot

Before the coffee gets cold, remember that "secure the border" means something different depending on which office is saying it, and the emotional pull of this topic is exactly why both sides get away with skipping that distinction.

Day 7 of our fifteen-day series, and we've arrived at the most polarizing topic in this entire project, deliberately placed at the midpoint because you've now had six days of practice separating rhetoric from actual authority. You're going to need that practice today. This is the subject most weaponized by misinformation on both sides, and the emotional pull is strong enough that even well-meaning people often skip the step of checking a claim before repeating it.

So pour a cup, take a breath, and let's walk through this with the same discipline we've applied to everything else.

The Legal Baseline Almost No Campaign Explains

Immigration law itself, who can enter the country, how asylum is processed, who gets deported, visa and citizenship rules, is constitutionally a federal power, not a state one. This isn't a partisan opinion; it's long-settled constitutional doctrine. A state cannot write its own immigration law, create its own deportation system, or override federal enforcement priorities. What a state can legally do: deploy its own National Guard and state troopers to assist with border monitoring, build barriers on state-owned or cooperating private land, enforce state-level criminal statutes like trespassing, and sue the federal government over specific policies. Texas's Operation Lone Star operates entirely within that second category, state resources supporting, not replacing, federal authority, and several of its specific tactics (river buoys, razor wire placement) have faced their own separate legal challenges testing exactly where that state authority ends.

Myth: "Immigrants Are Violent Criminals"

This is the single most repeated, most thoroughly studied, and most consistently contradicted claim in this entire debate, and it deserves a direct, evidence-based answer rather than a dodge.

A study using Texas Department of Public Safety data from 2012 to 2018, uniquely able to distinguish documented from undocumented immigrants' arrest records, found that undocumented immigrants were arrested for violent and drug crimes at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens, and for property crimes at roughly a quarter of the rate. This finding held consistently across the entire study period, with no evidence of rising criminality. Separate research from Northwestern University, examining 150 years of U.S. Census data, found immigrants have never been incarcerated at a higher rate than native-born citizens, and are currently about 60% less likely to be incarcerated. The Migration Policy Institute's review of the broader research base reaches the same conclusion: rising immigration levels have consistently correlated with falling, not rising, crime rates nationally since 1980.

None of this means individual crimes committed by immigrants, documented or not, don't happen or shouldn't be prosecuted. They do, and they should, exactly like crimes committed by native-born citizens. But the claim that immigrants as a population commit more violent crime than native-born Americans is not supported by the available data, repeated across multiple independent studies using different methodologies. Repeating this claim without evidence isn't a difference of political opinion; it's misinformation, regardless of which side is repeating it.

Myth: "Undocumented Immigrants Are Draining Federal and State Benefits"

This one requires more precision than either side usually gives it, because the honest answer depends entirely on which benefit and which immigration status you're talking about.

Undocumented immigrants are legally barred from nearly all federal public benefits, including Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF, under a 1996 federal law, with narrow exceptions for emergency medical treatment and K-12 education, which the Supreme Court has held must be provided to all children regardless of status. Emergency Medicaid, the main benefit undocumented immigrants can access, accounts for less than 1% of total Medicaid spending nationally. Lawfully present immigrants face their own restrictions: most must wait five years after obtaining legal status before qualifying for federal benefits at all, and when they do qualify, research consistently shows legal immigrants use federal benefits at lower rates than native-born citizens while paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits over time.

Where this does get genuinely complicated, and where honest nuance matters: states have their own authority to extend state-funded benefits beyond the federal floor, and roughly half of states have chosen to do so for specific populations like immigrant children or pregnant women. So "do immigrants get benefits" has a different true answer depending on federal versus state programs, and depending on documented versus undocumented status, a level of specificity campaign slogans on this topic almost never provide in either direction.

ICE Enforcement: What the Controversy Actually Involves

This has become one of the most divisive flashpoints nationally, and the emotional charge on both sides often outruns the specific, checkable facts.

Independent legal analysis and reporting have documented real, specific concerns: expanded use of expedited removal procedures with reduced judicial review, documented incidents of racial profiling in vehicle stops, a rapid workforce expansion that has reportedly outpaced training standards, and several high-profile incidents, including the deaths of U.S. citizens during ICE operations, that have drawn scrutiny from researchers across the political spectrum, including centrist policy institutions like Brookings. This is not a fringe or purely partisan concern; it reflects a documented accountability gap that has emerged as enforcement activity has scaled up quickly.

At the same time, supporters of expanded enforcement argue that consistent, visible enforcement is a legitimate deterrent function of immigration law and that isolated incidents, however serious, don't invalidate the broader enforcement mission. Both things can be assessed on their own terms: whether specific enforcement incidents violated due process or used excessive force is a factual, documentable question separate from the broader policy debate over how much enforcement is appropriate. Collapsing the two into "ICE is evil" or "any criticism of ICE is pro-crime" are both oversimplifications that avoid the actual, specific incidents worth evaluating on their own facts.

The Economic Picture: More Complicated Than Either "Drain" or "Pure Benefit"

Here's where the data genuinely cuts in multiple directions at once, and anyone offering a simple one-line verdict is leaving out real evidence.

At the federal level, the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the recent immigration surge from 2021-2026 found it would increase federal revenues by $1.2 trillion over the following decade, increase mandatory spending by only $0.3 trillion, reduce federal deficits by roughly $0.9 trillion, and raise GDP by an estimated $1.3 to $8.9 trillion depending on the specific CBO report and time horizon, primarily through increased labor force participation and payroll tax contributions.

At the state and local level, the picture is different and genuinely more costly in the near term: a separate CBO analysis found the same immigration surge added a net cost of roughly $9.2 billion to state and local budgets in 2023 alone, driven largely by education costs and increased demand for public services, equivalent to about 0.3% of total state and local spending, a real but modest burden relative to overall budgets. Critics of this analysis, including some congressional Republicans, have argued the CBO's federal-level estimate is too optimistic because it excludes significant discretionary spending and law enforcement costs, citing a separate estimate of roughly $278 billion in total federal costs tied to illegal immigration over a decade. Both the CBO's revenue-focused analysis and the cost-focused counter-analysis are using real data; they're simply measuring different things and emphasizing different line items, a good example of how two technically accurate numbers can support opposite-sounding headlines.

The Longer-Range Question Neither Side's Slogans Address

This is the piece almost entirely missing from campaign rhetoric on both sides: the United States' labor force growth is slowing toward near-zero, driven by an aging population and falling birth rates, independent of any immigration debate at all. Federal Reserve researchers have found that breakeven employment growth, the number of new jobs needed each month just to hold the unemployment rate steady, is approaching zero, meaning the economy's room to grow without productivity gains alone is shrinking. Immigration has historically supplied nearly half of all growth in the prime working-age population since 2000. Migration Policy Institute researchers are explicit that immigration can offer only "half an answer" to this demographic pressure, not a complete solution, since immigrants themselves age too, and population-level fixes require more than raw numbers.

What this means practically: a policy of significantly tighter immigration, sustained over the long term, intersects directly with an already slowing labor force and an aging population needing more care workers, not fewer. A policy of significantly looser immigration raises real, legitimate near-term questions about state and local service costs and enforcement capacity. Neither a "close the border entirely" nor an "open the border" slogan grapples honestly with this longer-range tradeoff, and very few candidates in this specific election cycle are discussing it at this level of specificity at all.

Who Can Actually Do Something About This, Office by Office

Governor (Abbott vs. Hinojosa): can deploy state resources (Operation Lone Star), pursue state-level litigation against federal policy, and use the bully pulpit, but cannot set immigration law or override federal enforcement authority regardless of either candidate's rhetoric.

U.S. Senate (Paxton vs. Talarico): this is the one topic in this entire series where the office being sought has real, direct authority. A senator votes on federal immigration legislation, confirms DHS leadership and immigration judge appointments, and controls federal border funding appropriations. Whatever either candidate promises here is at least structurally possible for the office, even if it still requires building a coalition with 99 other senators and the House to actually become law.

A Student of Truth's Approach

• Is this specific claim about federal policy or state policy, and is the office being discussed actually positioned to change that lever?

• Does a crime or benefits claim cite independent, methodologically sound research, or a campaign's own framing?

• Am I treating an isolated enforcement incident as proof of a systemic pattern, or dismissing a documented pattern because of a single isolated defense?

• Does an economic claim measure federal impact, state impact, short-term cost, or long-term labor need, and am I comparing figures that are actually measuring the same thing?

A Call to Action

This week, before the coffee gets cold, pick one claim about crime, benefits, or cost tied to immigration that you've seen repeated confidently, by either side, and trace it to an independent source, CBO, a peer-reviewed study, or a nonpartisan research institute, rather than a campaign ad or a social media post.

Tomorrow, Day 8, we shift to a far less adversarial, broadly sympathetic topic: rural hospital closures and healthcare access.

A Student of Truth Is Now Available

A Student of Truth: Think Clearly in a World of Misinformation, Outrage, and AI is now live on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback. If holding two uncomfortable, evidence-based facts at once, on the most emotionally charged topic in this series, is the kind of thinking you value, I'd be grateful if you picked up a copy and left an honest review once you've finished it.

I'm also deep into writing the next book in the series, The Ledger and the Lie: Government, Economics, and the Stories We're Sold, targeted for completion by year end. Today's post, where the same CBO data produces both a trillion-dollar deficit reduction headline and a multi-billion-dollar cost headline depending on which line item you lead with, is exactly the kind of economic storytelling that book is built to untangle.

As always, I'd love to hear from you, especially if you live in a border community. What do you see on the ground that doesn't match the statewide campaign messaging from either party? Send your thoughts to hello@cletustaylor.com, or leave a comment wherever you're reading this.

Author note: Cletus Taylor writes the Finding Truth series to encourage thoughtful citizenship, moral courage, and the lifelong work of seeking truth with humility, especially on the topics where our emotions arrive faster than the evidence does.

Cletus Taylor, keeping the coffee hot and the data honest for tomorrow's conversation.