LatinaLista — The latest Pew Hispanic report, U.S. Unauthorized Immigration Flows Are Down Sharply Since Mid-Decade reflects several truths that are a result of our current immigration policies.
To the casual reader (who especially supports Arizona’s SB1070), all the news would appear good.
The undocumented population went from being 12 million in 2007 to 11.1 million in 2009 – a reduction of 8 percent.
The number of immigrants from Latin America — that’s not including Mexico — have registered the biggest decline in illegally immigrating to the United States. “From 2007 to 2009, the size of this group from the Caribbean, Central America and South America decreased 22%.”
Undocumented immigrants from Mexico peaked in 2007 and have now leveled off.
According to the center’s estimates, an average of 150,000 unauthorized immigrants from Mexico arrived annually during the March 2007 to March 2009 period–70% below the annual average of 500,000 that prevailed during the first half of the decade.
All this decline in numbers means that those parts of the country unaccustomed to seeing brown faces or talking to people who had a bona fide reason to speak with an accent are finally getting their wish of not wanting these immigrants to live in their towns. From the west coast to the east coast, groups of states are registering significant declines.
In those states accustomed to being destinations for undocumented immigrants, they’re also seeing declines:
In 2009, 59% of unauthorized immigrants resided in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and New Jersey. However, the share living in those states has declined from 80% in 1990, as unauthorized immigrants have dispersed to new settlement areas.
There were 7.8 million unauthorized immigrants in the labor force in 2009, or 5.1% of the total. The size of the unauthorized labor force peaked in 2007 and declined in both 2008 and 2009. There were 7 million unauthorized immigrants employed in March 2009.
These highlights from the report support the fact that further states wanting to pass their version of Arizona’s SB1070 are doing it more out of malice and politics than real need.
Though Latino immigration advocates, activists and supporters have cautioned today’s politicians to be careful when jumping on the SB1070 bandwagon, one further revelation from this report illustrates and supports the premise that the action’s of today’s politicians supporting SB1070 will haunt them in the future.
According to the Pew Hispanic report, “the population of U.S.-born children with at least one unauthorized parent nearly doubled from 2000 to 2009, when they numbered 4 million. As a result, 79% of the children of unauthorized immigrants were born in the United States in 2009, compared with 57% in 2000.”
That number of children is a significant amount when it comes to future voters and influencers who will always remember how their families were driven out of their homes and schools because of the political smear campaign that disrupted and threatened their lives.
It’s no wonder conservative members of Congress have called for an end to birthright citizenship. Better to erase any future threat to the two-party political system than allow these children to develop their full rights as American citizens and remember what was done to them, their parents and family members.
From this report, we see that whether it’s from border enforcement, federal policies, the economic times or the ongoing threat posed by border cartel gangs, immigrants are less willing to risk their lives to come into the country illegally.
This should serve as the proof the GOP has said it needed before working on immigration reform.
If this isn’t enough, it’s clear nothing will ever be enough and that is a sad commentary on the integrity of the Republican Party.
