What Controls Immigration? It’s The Economy, Stupid
By Peter Schrag
It’s hardly news that, like Arizona, many states and scores of cities have been looking for ways to drive illegal immigrants out – ordering cops to detain people who can’t show documents verifying their right to be here, passing measures to fine landlords who rent to illegal immigrants and employers who hire them. And there are the Republicans who want to fiddle with the Constitution to deny children born to illegal aliens birthright citizenship.
So obviously Americans must be panicking because illegal immigration has been spiking, right?
Wrong. A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center, like a similar Census report earlier this year, indicates a dramatic decline not only in the number of people entering the country illegally between 2007 and 2009 -- for Mexicans, it’s down by 70 percent from three years ago -- but in the number of illegal aliens living here, down from roughly 12 million in 2007 to 11.1 million today.
