A Fanciful Immigration Tale Throughout the year,
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Throughout the year, Trump repeatedly claimed, with no proof, that Sayfullo Saipov — the Uzbekistan national who was arrested for a deadly terrorist attack in New York City in 2017 — brought 22 people with him into the United States through “chain migration.” There’s no evidence that Saipov brought even one relative to the country.
Princeton University professor Marta Tienda, a demographer who has studied “chain migration,” told us Trump’s 22 figure was “an implausible exaggeration given the current visa system.”
Saipov came to the U.S. in 2010 through the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Such visa holders may bring a spouse and children, but there’s no indication that happened in Saipov’s case. He married in the United States in 2013.
When he drove a truck into a crowd of pedestrians and bicyclists in New York City, Saipov was a legal permanent resident, a status that is also limited to sponsoring only a spouse and children.
At his midterm campaign rallies, however, Trump would rattle off various family members that he claimed Saipov had brought to the country, including Saipov’s mother and father. That’s false. They were living in Uzbekistan at the time of the attack, as reported by the Daily Mail and the Wall Street Journal. https://www.factcheck.org/2018/12/the-whoppers-of-2018/