What did Donald Trump say about immigration and the US / Mexico border that is inaccurate?
“When Mexico sends its people” Mexico isn’t sending anybody. That’s a huge falsehood. The reality is, individuals in Mexico are deciding, based on their own free will and ambition, to move to a completely different country. Simple market forces at work. And these people are hardworking and ambitious: You have to be, if you are to get up, leave behind everyone you ever knew, and travel thousands of miles, often in dangerous conditions, just to find work.
Contrast that to an actual example of sending people with problems: The Mariel Boat Lift. In 1980, Fidel Castro announced that Cuba’s borders were open, so people could flee to the US. Unbeknownst to us, though, he freed all the violent criminals from Cuba’s prisons and mental health hospitals, and sent them to the US. Most of them wound up in foul business in South Florida (Brian de Palma’s film Scarface is a dramatization of this process), and that was Castro’s goal.
.. Mr Trump’s statement (people are bringing problems) exploits an ambiguity in English between an episodic reading, where it happens sometimes and ageneric reading, where it’s the typical case. The generic reading is completely false, and offensively false. You bring up the episodic reading, but the thing is: The episodic reading is true, but trivially so. Every population has rapists and criminals among it. The episodic reading is true if only two out of a million immigrants are rapists.