12/27/2007
Mickey Kaus has an item:Is illegal immigration like crime in New York: They said it could never be reduced, until it was? More evidence that even the mild efforts at border control are having an impact.Kaus’s term for this, Gran Salida, translates as(roughly) Great Exodus, although Google Translate likes "Major Outing." I'd call it Great News. He has more. This one thing that George Will, for example, doesn’t seem to understand.a) The Gran Salida continues, reports Reuters, although the story offers no hard numbers (just a reported "spike" at a Mexcian consulate). Instapundit notes that one non-enforcement explanation — a shift in exchange rates — doesn’t appear to hold water.
b) And they don’t keep on coming: Meanwhile, the LAT reports on a decline in incoming illegal immigration, and the paper has some numbers. … Mexicans who say they plan to seek work abroad: down by a third. … Border arrests: down by 20%. … Most significantly:
The growth rate of the U.S. Mexican-born population has dropped by nearly half to 4.2% in 2007 from about 8% in 2005 and 2006, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center.
"We are not going to take the draconian police measures necessary to deport 11 million people. They would fill 200,000 buses in a caravan stretching bumper-to-bumper from San Diego to Alaska-where, by the way, 26,000 Latinos live. And there are no plausible incentives to get the 11 million to board the buses.” [Guard the Borders — And Face Facts, Too, By George F. Will, March 30, 2006]It’s not just that there are plausible incentives — it’s that he forgot that all those people came to America on those same buses. They just didn’t all come in the same day.
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