In a recent campaign speech that followed last week’s debate with former President Donald Trump, incumbent President Joe Biden put his Republican predecessor on blast for his highly publicized criticism of the United States as a supposed “third-world” nation. Trump uses the language regularly, harshly denigrating what sounds like the nation as a whole as he seeks another presidential term.

“He talks about us like we’re a third-world nation,” said Biden to attendees. “This is a nation that believes in honesty, decency, treating people with respect. We’re still a nation that gives everyone a fair shot and leaves no one behind. We’re still a nation that gives hate no safe harbor. And we’re still a nation that’s a beacon to the rest of the world. We can never give up on what makes America, America.”

Trump used the language even in that debate, characterizing the United States there and elsewhere as mired in existential threats.

“We’re like a Third World nation. Between weaponization of his election, trying to go after his political opponent, all of the things he’s done, we’ve become like a Third World nation,” claimed Trump from the stage, according to transcripts from CNN. “And it’s a shame the damage he’s done to our country. And I’d love to ask him, and will, why he allowed millions of people to come in here from prisons, jails and mental institutions to come into our country and destroy our country.” He makes similar claims regularly, basing much of his current campaign on all of that.

Trump was referring with that last portion to migrants to the U.S., but there is seemingly zero real-world evidence for the notion that these individuals are arriving en masse from “prisons” and “mental institutions,” and the attempts on the Right to associate these arrivals with substantial spikes in crime also fall flat under the evidence. For instance, crime statistics undercut the idea that New York City — one locale where a lot of migrants are ending up — is being somehow “destroyed.”