Illegal-Immigrant Population Declines: Numbers Down Significantly Since 2007

WASHINGTON (July 27, 2009) – An upcoming analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies of monthly data collected by the Census Bureau will show that fewer illegal immigrants are coming and more are returning home. The findings also show that the legal immigrant population has not declined. As a result, the overall foreign born population has held relatively steady. The report examines the extent to which stepped-up enforcement and the downturn in the economy account for this trend.

The report, entitled, “A Shifting Tide: Recent Trends in the Illegal Immigrant Population,” is embargoed until Wednesday, July 29, at midnight. Advance copies are available to the media. The study will be available online at www.CIS.org.

For more information, contact Steven Camarota at (202) 466-8185 or sac@cis.org.

'If Mexico had had an avalanche of foreigners so large'

Sergio Sarmiento, a renowned Mexican journalist whose column is syndicated throughout that country, has some interesting observations about the immigration controversy north of the border.

“The resistance in the United States to the Mexican invasion shouldn’t surprise us,” Sarmiento writes (the translation is mine), in a column noting that 11 percent of these born in Mexico are living in the United States. “The growth has been dizzying. In 1960, Mexico was barely seventh among the countries of origin of foreigners in the United States. Now it is first, by far. In 1970, only 760,000 persons born in Mexico lived in the American Union, (representing) 8 percent of the foreigners. By 2008 the number had grown 17-fold, to 12.7 million. In 2009, Mexicans were 21 percent of legal immigrants and 59 percent of the undocumented.”
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More Slaves, Please

An op-ed in yesterday's Post is titled "Immigration Pitfall: Why 'Legalization Only' Won't Fly" and I thought to myself it'd be worth a look to see what pro-enforcement arguments might have made it into the paper. Then I saw the authors and figured out what was up. Penned by former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda and amnesty czarina Tamar Jacoby, now head of a business-oriented open-borders lobby, the piece argues that amnesty must be coupled with increases in future guest-worker programs if it is to be acceptable to business or to Mexico. (The word "enforcement" appears just once in the whole piece.)
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