Trump v. Ramos

The Jorge Ramos encounter with Donald Trump will keep getting plenty of attention--the image of one of the top reporters in the U.S. getting tossed out of a news conference is noteworthy. Of course, this will focus even more attention on how the Republican Party wants to deal with immigration, and one small comment in particular caught my attention.

During the five-minute exchange, Ramos said that 40 percent of undocumented people in the United States enter through airports, not over the Mexican border. "I don't believe that. I don't believe it," Trump responded. 

A 2006 report by the Pew Hispanic Center found that as many as 45 percent of the people in the U.S. entered with legal visas but overstayed them.

This is a major part of our collective problem. There are a lot of facts about immigration, but people simply refuse to believe them. When that's the case, there is no reasoned discussion, there is no real debate, and there are no common sense solutions. A large number of Americans strongly believe things about immigration and immigrants that are clearly untrue, and they vote based on these unfounded beliefs. I assume many of those same people believe that President Obama is a Kenyan-born Muslim who happens also to be Communist. There's not much you can do with that.