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President Joe Biden answered questions from Wisconsin residents and Anderson Cooper at an event in Milwaukee, according to CNN.
Biden made at least four false claims.
The subjects he spoke so freely on were minimum wage, undocumented immigrants, China’s economy and Covid-19 vaccinations.
Biden $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage is too low.
“For example, if it went — if we gradually increased it — when we indexed it at $7.20, if we kept it indexed by — to inflation, people would be making 20 bucks an hour right now. That’s what it would be.”
This statement is inaccurate.
Biden spoke regarding the subject of immigration.
“The vast majority of the people, those 11 million undocumented, they’re not Hispanics; they’re people who came on a visa — who was able to buy a ticket to get in a plane and didn’t go home. They didn’t come across the Rio Grande swimming…”
In 2018 73% of undocumented people in the US speak Spanish at home and 68% are from the Mexico and Central America region, with an additional 7% from South America.
Undocumented people took advantage of visas and overstayed rather than crossing a border illegally; it was 62% overstays and 38% illegal crossings
Biden visited China as VP and met the now-president Xi Jinping.
Biden said upon his return to the U.S., “And I came back and said they’re going to end their One China — their one child policy, because they’re so xenophobic they won’t let anybody else in, and more people are retired than working. How can they sustain economic growth when more people are retired?”
China reported having about 775 million employed people at the end of 2019; China had a reported 254 million people aged 60 or above, the normal retirement-benefits age for men. “The working aged population has peaked and is now declining and retirees are growing rapidly, so the ratio of workers to retirees is becoming less favorable. But the ratio is still greater than 1,” said David Dollar.
“I think he misspoke. Probably meant that the working age population is now slowly shrinking, a trend that will continue for many years,” said Nicholas Lardy.
Biden made many claims regarding the COVID vaccine.
“we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available.”
“We got into office and found out the supply — there was no backlog. I mean, there was nothing in the refrigerator, figuratively and literally speaking, and there were 10 million doses a day that were available.”
“But when you and I talked last, we talked about — it’s one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn’t have when we came into office, but a vaccinator — how do you get the vaccine into someone’s arm?”
When Biden said “10 million doses a day” what he meant was 10 million doses a week that were being sent to states as of the second week of Biden’s term.
Biden made claims regarding the Proud Boys.
Biden said, “You may remember in one of my debates with the former President, I asked him to condemn the Proud Boys. He wouldn’t do it. He said, ‘Stand by. Stand ready.’ Or whatever the phrasing exactly was.”
Biden criticized Trump for cutting the number of refugees allowed into the US. He said: “For example, we used to allow refugees — 125,000 refugees in the United States in a yearly basis. It was as high as 250,000. Trump cut it to 5,000.”
From CNN:
The US set a refugee cap of 231,700 for the 1980 fiscal year, so Biden was in the ballpark in his claim that the US has had a cap as high as “250,000.” That year, the US actually admitted 207,116 people.
Biden’s claim that “Trump cut it to 5,000” is reasonable but takes some explaining. Trump set the refugee admissions cap for the 2021 fiscal year at a record low of 15,000. Through the first four months of the fiscal year, the US had only accepted 1,400 — just about a 5,000-per-year pace.
Biden says he wants to raise the fiscal 2021 cap to 62,500 refugees. He has proposed a cap of 125,000 refugees for his first full fiscal year, 2022.
