A lot of lawmakers say that North Carolina, which is more than 1,000 miles from Mexico, has become a border state because of the Biden administration’s policies on immigration.
Democratic candidates for office in North Carolina are running ads on the radio and TV that show people jumping fences and going across dry land. Republicans in Congress from North Carolina have raised concerns about a government facility in Greensboro that will house children who enter the U.S. illegally from Mexico.
The Democrats have even asked Roy Cooper, the governor of the state, to send troops from the state’s National Guard to Texas.
Dozens of Republican senators wrote to Cooper in January, “Every day, North Carolinians have to deal with the effects of President Biden’s open border policies.”
“Under his administration’s watch, millions have illegally poured through our southern border and have wreaked havoc on our public safety, strained our social safety net, and weakened the rule of law in our country.”
The words make it sound like the state is overrun by illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. during President Joe Biden’s time in office. However, data about North Carolina’s crime rate, public schools, and social safety net shows a different picture.
The letter from the lawmakers to Cooper says that “increased criminal activity and overstressed resources are just a few of the challenges that North Carolina faces because the federal government has done nothing” at the border.
Noncitizens have been involved in some high-profile crimes in North Carolina, but there isn’t much proof that they’re causing a general rise.
That’s because North Carolina’s top law enforcement agencies don’t keep track of crimes made by people who aren’t citizens, and crime is also going down across the state. The State Bureau of Investigation doesn’t keep track of crimes made by people who aren’t citizens. The state Department of Public Safety and the office of the attorney general of the state also don’t.
The SBI is North Carolina’s main agency that looks into crimes. The most recent information it has on serious crime shows that it is going down. The most latest information from the bureau is from 2022. A spokesperson for the North Carolina SBI said that the 2023 data won’t be made public until later this year.
Murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated attack made up 412 of every 100,000 people who lived in the country in 2022. SBI said that’s less than the 428 per 100,000 in 2021 and the 451 in 2020.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, crime rates are falling more sharply across the country. The FBI found that the violent crime rate in 2022 was one of the third-lowest in the past 50 years. Early predictions for 2023 show that the national violent crime rate will continue to drop.
In April, Jeff Asher, a crime analyst for AH Datalytics, wrote that the government crime data system isn’t set up to say for sure if there is a crime wave caused by immigrants.
“That said,” he said, “the overall trend of declining violent crime nationally, and seeing no localized crime surges in the places I’d expect to see one if there was such a ‘wave,’ strongly suggests that no such thing exists.”
That doesn’t mean that people who aren’t citizens don’t do violent acts.
Awet Hagos, who is from the African country of Eritrea, got into a fight with police in Gates County earlier this year. Also, in 2022, Arturo Marin Sotelo and Alder Alfonso Sotelo, two Mexican brothers, were charged with killing a police sheriff in Wake County.
But those cases don’t directly involve the Biden administration’s strategy on the border.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says Hagos officially came to the U.S. in 2016 but did not leave when he was supposed to. A spokesperson for ICE, Lindsay Williams, said that the date of his exit is private information. Williams said that the agency doesn’t know where or when the Sotelo boys came into the U.S. illegally.
Some lawmakers say there is a link between the U.S. border and cases of fentanyl overdoses all over the country. When talking about the death of a Cornelius teen who overdosed on fentanyl, a strong synthetic opioid, Republican U.S. Rep. Dan Bishop, who serves a district in the Charlotte area, brought up Biden’s immigration policies.
“These deaths could have been avoided, but the Biden administration won’t enforce our laws or keep the border safe,” Bishop told constituents in a July email.
A study from the North Carolina Chief Medical Examiner says the number of deaths linked to fentanyl has gone through the roof, from 442 in 2016 to 3,340 last year.
The illegal drug mostly comes into the United States from Mexico. But noncitizens living in North Carolina aren’t the main ones who move or distribute them.
According to government statistics and policy analysts, illegal fentanyl is usually packed by Mexican cartels, brought across the border by U.S. citizens, and then sold by gangs in the U.S.
The U.S. Sentencing Commission says that between 2019 and 2023, 86% of the people who were found guilty of selling fentanyl were U.S. citizens. And the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and its Customs and Border Protection office say that most of the fentanyl that comes into the country illegally is hidden on vehicles that go through legal ports of entry.
A top foreign policy fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank named Vanda Felbab-Brown said, “Drugs like fentanyl are not carried by migrants.”
In her center, Felbab-Brown co-directs the series “The Opioid Crisis in America: Domestic and International Dimensions.” She said that the best way to stop illegal fentanyl from coming into the U.S. would be to add more and better car scanners at our borders. But Congress is the only one who can do that.
Nearby in a northwest Greensboro neighborhood is one of the most common reasons given for why immigration laws need to be changed. The federal government has been fixing up a site that used to be a boarding school so that it can house up to 800 teens who come to the southern U.S. border without a parent.
Republicans like U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, U.S. Rep. Richard Hudson, and Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson have called news conferences to ask for information about the center.
Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan told PolitiFact NC that the federal government and local governments haven’t been talking to each other as well as they could be. She has had to deal with a lot of stories about migrants at the center, even though no teens have been there yet.
Voughan told PolitiFact NC, “I would say there’s been a lot of anger, especially from people in the neighborhood.” “And I certainly understand that, because they don’t know what to expect and because of, you know, rumors and false news stories.”
The mayor of Greensboro says she has worked hard to answer valid concerns:
- Someone asked Vaughan if the refugees stay in the area for a long time. Vaughan said that’s not how the program is meant to work. The kids will be there for three or four weeks before being taken to be with their parents, a cousin, or a sponsor.
- Concerns have been raised that refugees might be able to leave campus or need to use local services. Vaughan responded that the campus is meant to be self-sufficient. It has its own dorms, dining hall, track, soccer grounds, tennis courts, and medical center.
- Vaughn said that the federal government opened a remote parking lot and started busing workers to the school because they were worried about the traffic that would happen because of the building’s nearly 800 employees.
To worries that the migrant center would need money from the local government. Vaughan has been told that it won’t happen.
“So far, I don’t believe there have been inconveniences,” she stated, “except for the anxiety.”
House Republicans used a situation in New Hanover County Schools as an example of how immigration affects North Carolina’s public schools in the letter they sent to Cooper asking him to send the National Guard to Texas.
“Even as you declared 2024 the ‘Year of the Public School,’” they wrote, “the New Hanover County Schools Superintendent proposed closing a special-needs public school and replacing it with a ‘newcomers school’ for non-citizens.”
That account of what happened in New Hanover isn’t fully true.
Leaders in New Hanover did think about shutting down the Career Readiness Academy at Mosely, which helps kids get ready for high school. Blair Rhoades, a spokesman for the state Department of Public Instruction, said that the academy is not a special-needs school even though it helps kids with special needs, which is similar to many public schools.
At the same time, Christina Beam, a spokesperson for New Hanover County Schools, said that leaders in New Hanover were thinking about putting all of the academic services for kids who speak more than one language in one place.
“This idea never got past the “what if?” stage and isn’t moving forward.” “The high school program for career readiness will also stay open,” Beam told PolitiFact NC.
Beam said that the kids’ citizenship was never taken into account. Neither New Hanover County nor the state keep track of whether or not their kids are citizens.
Many school districts stopped tracking students’ immigration status after the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited Texas from excluding students who are in the country illegally, Rhoades said. That was in 1982.
“The Supreme Court case discussed the concern that it is unfair to punish students for the misconduct of their parents who may have crossed the border illegally,” Rhoades wrote in an email.
“Further, the Court reasoned that the public interest weighs against having a class of children in the U.S. that are educated and out of school,” said Rhoades. “As a result of this case, information about the immigration status of students is pretty universally not collected by public schools.”
The state’s English learners population has grown modestly in recent years.
For the most recent school year, 162,778 students in North Carolina public schools learned English. This is up from about 128,060 students in the 2019–20 school year. During that time, they made up a slightly higher portion of all the students in public schools. English learners made up 8.3% of public school students in 2019 and 10.7% of those in 2018.
Between 2019 and 2023, the number of ELLs in New Hanover County rose by 48%, to 2,438. English learners made up 6.4% of New Hanover’s public school population during the 2019-20 school year and 9.8% of the public school population last year.
Are noncitizens straining NC’s social safety net?
A group of Republican lawmakers in the state said that immigration are “straining” the state’s social safety net. So, we found out how many people who are not citizens are getting help from the government.
Benefits from Medicaid. Medicaid can cover some noncitizens’ health care costs, but most of them have to wait five years before they can apply. Some people are exempt from the rules: pregnant women, children, protection seekers, refugees, victims of trafficking, and people coming from Cuba or Haiti.
State statistics from the Department of Health and Human Services shows that about 2.1% of North Carolina’s Medicaid recipients are not citizens. More than 2.9 million people in North Carolina had signed up for Medicaid by the end of August. There were about 63,500 people who were not citizens.
Take a look at that picture from four years ago, when Trump was president.
It took care of more than 2.3 million North Carolinians in August 2020. Of those, 27,271 (1.1%) were not citizens.
Medicaid in an emergency. Non-citizens who don’t have the right legal status can’t get full Medicaid benefits. People who are in the country illegally can still get to some emergency services, though.
“If someone was in a serious car accident and was taken to an emergency room and given care there; or if a pregnant woman comes to the ED to give birth.” A spokesperson for the state health department, Kelly Haight Connor, said, “It would cover that specific case.” Coverage for emergencies doesn’t cover long-term care.
The number of non-citizens calling for emergency services stayed below 100 per month in 2020. From August to January of this year, the number of claims has gone from 89 to 186.
Ciara Zachary, an assistant professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at UNC-Chapel Hill, said, “I don’t think that undocumented noncitizens are putting a strain on our health care system.”
She said that if there were a lot of claims in North Carolina, the federal government would pay for a lot of them.
“Of course, during economic hardship, states might feel that pressure on the budget,” she said. “But at least so far… It’s not like anyone has said that too many people have Medicaid.
What about people who are unemployed?
Unemployment insurance payments can be claimed by noncitizens who have a valid alien registration number, are legally allowed to work in the United States, and have certain visas. The North Carolina Department of Commerce says that the number of claims made by people who are not citizens has been going down for years.
There were 10,706 claims made by noncitizens in 2014, but only 2,155 in 2019. That’s a drop from 4% of all claims to 1%. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there were a lot more claims; in 2020, more than 98,000 noncitizens asked for jobless benefits.
Non-citizens made 3,771 claims last year, which is 2% of all claims. That’s about 2% of all claims, or 1,918 claims, made by people who are not citizens as of June 30.
Are noncitizens illegally influencing elections?
Trump and other lawmakers have said false things about how millions of immigrants are registering to vote or have voted in the past. In North Carolina, lawmakers want voters to change the state constitution this fall so that it makes it clearer that people who are not citizens can’t vote.
The North Carolina State Constitution already says that people who live in the state can only vote. The suggested change would say the same thing, but in a slightly different way.
People who are against the Republican-backed amendment say that the GOP is using the problem to try to get more conservative voters to the polls by making people think that noncitizens can vote when they are not.
Legislators have not shown any proof that noncitizens are changing the results of North Carolina’s votes.
A spokesman for the state elections board, Patrick Gannon, said, “Usually, there are very few, if any, cases of noncitizen registration or voting referred for prosecution statewide each year.” This shows how rarely noncitizens register to vote or register, he said.
Eight years ago was the most recent and biggest case of noncitizens voting in North Carolina elections. 19 people who were not citizens but voted in the 2016 elections were charged by federal officials. 16 people pleaded guilty, mostly to misdemeanors connected to voting while not being a citizen. Three cases were thrown out.
Since 2016, the state elections board has sent three people who they think are not citizens to be prosecuted: one in 2018, one in 2020, and one in 2021.
North Carolina election officials don’t have a complete, reliable, or up-to-date list of people who are eligible to vote that they can check when someone registers to vote, Gannon said. But voters have to give information that can help poll officials find out if a voter is a citizen.
When someone signs up to vote, they have to give their date of birth and either their driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number.
“These numbers are validated against data from the Division of Motor Vehicles and/or the Social Security Administration,” Gannon wrote in an email.