Immigration Studies Director David J. Bier Testifies Before the House Judiciary Committee

David J. Bier

You can find my written testimony here. The video below gives my prepared remarks:

Chairman McClintock, Ranking Member Jayapal, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify.

For half a century, the Cato Institute’s research has shown that people—whatever their ancestry, background, or birthplace—can thrive in a free society.

Our research finds immigrants—legal and illegal—work at higher rates, generate more income and taxes, and have reduced the national debt by $14.5 trillion over the last 30 years.

Immigrants improve public safety by reducing violent crime rates, meaning that you are less likely to be a victim.

Fairfax highlights this reality. About half the county’s residents are immigrants or children of immigrants.

Its household income is double the national average, and its murder rate is less than half the average.

If illegal immigrants in Fairfax were their own city, they’d have a lower homicide rate than 90 percent of America’s largest cities and the country overall.

Nationwide, illegal immigrants are half as likely to commit crimes that land them in prison as US-born Americans.

Despite all this, Congress refuses to allow most would-be immigrants to come legally, which leads to illegal immigration.

Just 3% of applicants seeking legal permanent resident status were approved in 2024.

That was before the current administration banned a majority of the legal immigrants previously allowed to come, including half of all spouses of US citizens.

It has cut legal immigration twice as much as illegal immigration.

At the same time, it terminated legal status for over 2 million immigrants who were already here, creating four times as many new illegal immigrants as it has deported.

America’s cities must manage the fallout from this sabotaged system. Many have decided not to volunteer their cops, jails, and resources to DHS.

DHS doesn’t like that, but under our Constitution, cities and states don’t take orders from the feds.

And thank James Madison for that because we all know we wouldn’t want the Feds to dictate environmental policy, gun policy, or COVID policy to the states.

If you want Fairfax to change its policy, you must convince them.

The first step would be to give up the mass deportation dream.

About one in five Fairfax residents is someone who could be deported or who lives with them.

It would destroy neighborhoods, rip Americans from their spouses, parents, friends, families, customers, employees, employers, nurses, nannies, and teachers.

Let me be clear: Noncitizens who harm Americans should be arrested, convicted, and deported.

I think cities can help with that, but deportation is DHS’s job.

Indeed, you all passed the Laken Riley Act in 2025 to require DHS to immediately take custody of people charged with violence or theft.

Yet DHS is ignoring that law. It has deprioritized threats to focus on easy targets.

They aren’t tracking down serious criminal fugitives like the monster who killed Stephanie Minter.

Instead, DHS agents are racially profiling Americans at Home Depots, arresting spouses of US citizens at green card interviews, beating the parents of US Marines, and dragging legal immigrant nursing mothers from their homes without warrants.

Only 6% of ICE arrests have a violent criminal conviction. ICE has arrested 150,000 people who have no criminal convictions or even charges.

And we know it’s not because they got everyone with a serious record. Stephanie’s case and many others prove it.

It’s because they care about, as one ICE agent put it, “quantity over quality.”

How many Stephanies will get murdered before DHS follows the law and prioritizes serious criminals?

How many?

Most Americans don’t want to wait for the answer. They want to pause the mass deportation fantasy and focus on protecting Americans.

That’s the only policy that will defend our safety, prosperity, and freedom.

Thank you.

You can watch the entire hearing here. A few highlights below. I will say that Republicans did raise some good points, but their main criticism of the commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax didn’t match the facts of the cases discussed.

Source: https://www.cato.org/blog/testimony-house-judiciary-committee