As the November midterm elections near, political candidates and TV ads are pushing inaccurate and misleading claims about immigration. And according to an NPR/Ipsos poll, a significant number of Americans believe these falsehoods.
About 1,000 adults in the U.S. were asked if they believed a variety of claims about immigration, including whether there was an invasion at the southern border and whether most of the fentanyl entering the U.S. was smuggled in by migrants crossing the border illegally. Those assertions are not true.
“The fact that the public believes them is, I think, mainly because that’s the information they’re being told over and over by political leaders,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, the managing director of Immigration and Cross-Border Policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center.
PolitiFact reviewed the claims believed to be true by survey respondents. Most defy the facts.
Some elected officials, conservative media outlets and social media users have repeatedly claimed that the southern border is open. According to the NPR poll, 42% of the Americans surveyed believe it is either completely or somewhat true that “the U.S. is implementing an open border policy along the southern border.”
But the border isn’t “open.”
“Open border insinuates that there is nobody guarding the border and nobody attempting to stop people from crossing the border, and that is not true,” said Brown.
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