Posted on 04/26/2012 6:24:04 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The illegal-immigration problem is going away.
That’s the conclusion I draw from the latest report of the Pew Hispanic Center on Mexican immigration to the United States.
Pew’s demographers have carefully combed through statistics compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Mexican government, and have come up with estimates of the flow of migrants from and back to Mexico. Their work seems to be as close to definitive as possible. They conclude that from 2005 to 2010, some 1.39 million people came from Mexico to the United States and 1.37 million went from the U.S. to Mexico. “The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States,” they write, “has come to a standstill.”
The turning point seems to have come with the collapse of housing prices and the onset of recession in 2007. Annual immigration from Mexico dropped from peaks of 770,000 in 2000 and 670,000 in 2004 to 140,000 in 2010.
As a result, the Mexican-born population in the United States decreased from 12.6 million in 2007 to 12.0 million in 2010. That decrease consisted entirely of Mexican-born illegal immigrants, whose numbers decreased from 7 million in 2007 to 6.1 million in 2010.
Mitt Romney has been ridiculed for saying that illegal immigrants should “self-deport.” But that seems to be exactly what many of them have been doing. The U.S. government has been sending back more illegals lately, but most of the flow to Mexico has been voluntary.
The Pew analysts hesitate to say so, but their numbers make a strong case that we will never again see the flow of Mexicans into this country that we saw between 1970, when there were fewer than 1 million Mexican-born people in the U.S., and 2007, when there were 12.7 million.
One reason is that Mexico’s population growth has slowed way down. Its fertility rate fell from 7.3 children per woman in 1970 to 2.4 in 2009, which is just above replacement level.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s economy has grown. Despite sharp currency devaluations in 1982 and 1994, its per capita gross domestic product rose 22 percent from 1980 to 2010.
Mexico, like the United States, experienced a recession from 2007 to 2009. But since then, Mexico’s GDP has grown far faster than ours — 5.5 percent in 2010 and 3.9 percent in 2011. Mexico seemed yoked to the U.S. growth rate after passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. But since the recession, it seems yoked to the more robust growth rate of the state with the biggest cross-border trade, Texas.
An end to the huge flow of immigrants from Mexico has huge implications for U.S. immigration policy.
Because of our long land border with Mexico (the Rio Grande is a trickle most of the year), it has been relatively easy to emigrate illegally from that country. As a result, Mexican immigrants tend to be younger, poorer, less educated, and less fluent in English than immigrants from other countries. They are also more likely to be illegal — Mexicans are 30 percent of all immigrants but 58 percent of illegals — and less likely to become U.S. citizens.
A continued standstill in Mexican immigration means that the number of illegals in the United States will probably continue to decline, even in an economic recovery. Children of illegals born in the U.S., who are automatically U.S. citizens, don’t add to the illegal numbers. And no other country has produced or is likely to produce anything close to the number or share of illegals that Mexico has.
The central focus of the debate over the so-called comprehensive immigration bills that came to the floor of the Senate in 2006 and 2007 was their provisions for legalization of those illegally here — amnesty, to opponents. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama is promising to push for such legislation, just as he promised in 2008. But he didn’t deliver when Democrats had supermajorities in both houses and is unlikely to get anywhere on this project in a second term.
It may not matter much. With the Mexican reservoir of potential illegals dried up, and with better border enforcement and increased use of the much improved E-Verify system in workplaces, the illegal population seems likely to decline.
The key immigration issue for the future is whether America, like our Anglosphere cousins Canada and Australia, will let in more high-skilled immigrants.
— Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner
Great. We’re solving our illegal immigrant problem by driving our economy into the toilet and destroying our future.
RE: We’re solving our illegal immigrant problem by driving our economy into the toilet and destroying our future.
Well, that’s one way to do it... make America more like Mexico instead of the other way around... California is doing this even as we speak...
I thought it was impossible to deport all these people? I thought there was no way for them the re-partriate. It was deemd impossible, remember?
Stopped right there.
Rats aren’t into a sinking ship.
This is direct evidence that “self-deportation” is the answer.
In other words: No we do not need to deport 20 million illegal aliens.
Just don’t let anyone in the country illegally work.
Couldn’t be simpler. Presto: they’ll find jobs. By being resourceful, determined, even if necessary making difficult and sometimes dangerous treks long distances - with personal perseverance, risking elements to heroically travel to where they can find jobs.
At home.
How many of those 1.4 million leaving just happened to have a baby here and left it with relatives with cradle to grave gov’t bennies?
The only reason this is even news right now is because Obama wants it to be. He will use this to say “see, most of the illegals have left so lets just legalise the one that remain”. It will be around that time that we find out those statistics were inaccurate. It’s the “bait and switch style” of this administration. If immigration was no longer a problem, they would have dropped the Arizona law suit. They haven’t.
It does it you actually interpret the Constitution and the 14th Amendment corectly. And as far as allowing in more highly-skilled workers, we should be producing those ourselves. It would be an exponential benefit to do so.
And there has been no decrease in legal immigration, which is about 1.2 million a year, with about 150,000 a year coming from Mexico.
Of course it is just possible that the only people left in Mexico these days are tourists, drug cartel members, and the ruling elite.
All the rest have moved north so no more folks to cross the border
Any media story about the border is suspect.
Notice how none of them interview border county sherriffs.
Bet they have a much different story to tell.
RE: Of course it is just possible that the only people left in Mexico these days are tourists, drug cartel members, and the ruling elite.
Last time I checked, Mexico’s population is 113 Million people. Hard to believe that most of them are tourists, drug cartel members and ruling elites....
How about we put enough boots along the border to count them as they leave?
That way we can be SURE the problem is going away.
Otherwise, not so much.
They may not be working here but I can assure you they are on virtually every government tit that is available together with their anchor babies. They are not going anywhere.
and the unemployment rate is really 8.3%
“Any media story about the border is suspect.”
Yep. I see no shortage of the invaders in Houston.
I call B.S.
Illegals avoid the census carefully. Many are living in unauthorized converted quarters like garages. That was a big problem in east LA years ago, & it has only gotten worse.
Due to limits on occupancy, they also lie about how many people are living in any particular residence.
I don’t trust a single word that janet Nappy says—at anytime—so why should I trust her with this piece of info?
Ask the people who live within 300 miles of the Mexican border & you will find out better answers.
Mexico’s poverty problem got exported to the USA. No wonder they are doing better than us. They don’t have to fund all of the welfare cases they had, while we have to pay billions upon billions for the health care and education of 15 million illegals from Mexico on top of all of the legals.
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