President made at least four false statistical claims

President Joe Biden took questions from Wisconsin residents and from Anderson Cooper at a CNN town hall event in Milwaukee on Tuesday night. Biden made at least four false claims — all of them involving statistics — about the minimum wage, undocumented immigrants, China’s economy and COVID-19 vaccinations.

Biden also made claims that could have benefited from some additional context, that he acknowledged he might not have gotten right or that there is not solid evidence for. Here is a breakdown.

The minimum wage

Biden said the $7.25 per hour federal minimum wage is too low, then said soon after: “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 is false. The White House said after the event that Biden got mixed up with another statistic about the minimum wage. Today’s federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, which took effect in 2009, would not be even close to $20 per hour if Congress had decided to link it to inflation. Adjusted for inflation, $7.25 in January 2009 was equal to $8.98 in January 2021.

Undocumented popul tion

Biden said of the U.S. population of undocumented immigrants: “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 ...”

Biden was wrong to claim that the majority of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are not Hispanic. While it is obviously difficult to compile comprehensive statistics on this population group, the Migration Policy Institute think tank estimated in 2018 that 73% of undocumented people in the U.S. speak Spanish at home and 68% are from the Mexico and Central America region, with an additional 7% from South America. The Pew Research Center has found that the Mexican share of the undocumented population has fallen over time, but that people from Latin America still made up 77% of the 2017 undocumented population.

China’s workforce

Biden talked about how he met with China’s now President, Xi Jinping, while Biden was vice president, and then returned to the U.S. and mused about China’s demographic challenges. He said, “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?”

It is not even close to true that more people in China are retired than working — even today, let alone when Biden was vice president and the Chinese workforce was younger. 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 vaccine situation

Biden made a series of claims about the COVID-19 vaccine situation upon his January inauguration. He said early at the town hall that when “we came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available.” Moments later, he said, “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.” Soon after that, he told Cooper, “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?”

Biden got at least one of these statistics wrong — in a way that made Trump look better, not worse, so Biden’s inaccuracy appeared accidental. A White House official said Biden’s claim about “10 million doses a day” being available when he took office was meant to be a reference to the 10 million doses a week that were being sent to states as of the second week of Biden’s term, up from 8.6 million a week when they took over. The official said Biden’s claim about “50 million doses” being available when he took office was a reference to the number of doses that had been distributed to states as of the end of January. That was less than two weeks into his term, but he could have been clearer on the time frame.

Biden’s more dramatic claim here, that there was “nothing in the refrigerator” when he took office, has a solid factual basis, though Biden could again have been clearer about what he meant. The official said this was a reference to the fact that, as reported by The Washington Post in the week before Biden’s inauguration, there was no federal reserve of second doses available at the time.