A fact check of remarks from President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech:
BORDER WALL
TRUMP: "These (border) agents will tell you where walls go up, illegal crossings go way, way down ... San Diego used to have the most illegal border crossings in our country. In response, a strong security wall was put in place. This powerful barrier almost completely ended illegal crossings ... Simply put, walls work and walls save lives."
THE FACTS: It's a lot more complicated than that.
Yes, Border Patrol arrests in the San Diego sector plummeted 96 per cent from nearly 630,000 in 1986 to barely 26,000 in 2017, a period during which walls were built. But the crackdown pushed illegal crossings to less-patrolled and more remote Arizona deserts, where thousands died in the heat. Arrests in Tucson in 2000 nearly matched San Diego's peak.
Critics say the "water-balloon effect" - build a wall in one spot and migrants will find an opening elsewhere - undermines Trump's argument, though proponents say it only demonstrates that walls should be extended.
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2017 that the US has not developed metrics that demonstrate how barriers have contributed to border security.
TARIFFS
TRUMP: "We recently imposed tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese goods - and now our treasury is receiving billions of dollars."
THE FACTS: This is misleading. Yes, money from tariffs is going into the federal treasury, but it's largely coming from US businesses and consumers. It's not foreign countries that are paying these import taxes by cutting a check to the government.
His reference to money coming into the treasury "now" belies the fact that tariffs go back to the founding of the country. This revenue did not start with his increased tariffs on some goods from China.
Tariffs did produce $41.3 billion in tax revenues in the last budget year, according to the Treasury Department. But that is a small fraction of a federal budget that exceeds $4.1 trillion.
The tariffs paid by US companies also tend to result in higher prices for consumers, which is what happened for washing machines after the Trump administration imposed import taxes.
TRADE-NAFTA
TRUMP: "Our new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement - or USMCA - will replace NAFTA and deliver for American workers: bringing back our manufacturing jobs, expanding American agriculture, protecting intellectual property, and ensuring that more cars are proudly stamped with the four beautiful words: MADE IN THE USA."
THE FACTS: It's unlikely to do all those things, since the new agreement largely preserves the structure and substance of NAFTA.
In one new feature, the deal requires that 40 per cent of cars' contents eventually be made in countries that pay autoworkers at least $16 an hour - that is, in the United States, or Canada, but not in Mexico. It also requires Mexico to pursue an overhaul of labour law to encourage independent unions that will bargain for higher wages and better working conditions for Mexicans.
Still, just before the agreement was signed, General Motors announced that it would lay off 14,000 workers and close five plants in the United States and Canada.
Philip Levy, senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a trade official in Republican President George W Bush's White House, says: "President Trump has seriously overhyped this agreement."
HUMAN TRAFFICKING
TRUMP: "Human traffickers and sex traffickers take advantage of the wide open areas between our ports of entry to smuggle thousands of young girls and women into the United States and to sell them into prostitution and modern-day slavery."
THE FACTS: His administration has not supplied evidence that women and girls are smuggled by the "thousands" across remote areas of the border for these purposes. What has been established is nearly 80 per cent of international trafficking victims cross through legal ports of entry, a flow that would not be stopped by a border wall.
Trump distorts how often trafficking victims come from the southern border, according the Counter-Trafficking Data Collaborative , a global hub for trafficking statistics with data contributed by organisations from around the world.
The National Human Trafficking Hotline, a venture supported by federal money and operated by the anti-trafficking group Polaris , began tracking individual victim records in 2015. From January through June 31, 2018, it tracked 35,000 potential victims. Of those, there was a near equal distribution between foreigners on one hand and US citisens and legal permanent residents on the other.
Most of the labour trafficking victims were foreign, and most of the sex trafficking victims were US citizens. Of foreign nationals, Mexico had the most frequently trafficked.
ECONOMY
TRUMP: "In just over two years since the election, we have launched an unprecedented economic boom - a boom that has rarely been seen before. There's been nothing like it. ... An economic miracle is taking place in the United States."
THE FACTS: The president is vastly exaggerating what has been a mild improvement in growth and hiring. The economy is healthy but not nearly one of the best in US history.
The economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.8 per cent last spring and summer, a solid pace. But it was just the fastest in four years. In the late 1990s, growth topped four per cent for four straight years, a level it has not yet reached under Trump. And growth even reached 7.2 per cent in 1984.
Almost all independent economists expect slower growth this year as the effect of the Trump administration's tax cuts fade, trade tensions and slower global growth hold back exports, and higher interest rates make it more expensive to borrow to buy cars and homes.
