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More immigrants, Border Patrol apprehensions in last year

September 28, 2008 - 8:23PM
By Jared Taylor

The number of immigrants who came to the United States in 2007 dropped significantly from the year before - the result of a sagging nationwide economy, experts said.

But with a local economy far less crippled by the economic woes that hit many areas of the country, the amount of foreign-born residents in Hidalgo and Cameron counties went up. Apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol of immigrants illegally entering the country in the Rio Grande Valley have also gone up.

The revelation came last week after the U.S. Census Bureau released its 2007 American Community Survey, a census-like review of about 3 million households across the country.

Nationwide, about half a million immigrants came to the United States in 2007, far less than the 1.7 million who came here the year before.

Sociologists attributed the nationwide economic slump for the drop across the country, not increased border security efforts by the U.S. government.

"People are responding to economic pressures and that's why they come," said Chad Richardson, who heads the sociology department at the University of Texas-Pan American in Edinburg. "It's more of an economic issue than a border enforcement issue, I think."

Still, there are more immigrants living in the country today than ever before.

More than 38 million foreign-born residents - 12.6 percent of the population - call the United States home, including those with legal and illegal immigration status, according to the survey. That's the highest percentage since 1920, toward the end of the country's last large immigration boom that brought millions of people to the United States.

Because the Census estimates come from a survey, each includes a margin of sampling error that makes year-to-year comparisons inexact. And the survey only counted counties with populations of 65,000 or greater.

However, the disparity between the last two years shows the amount of immigrants coming to the country as a whole has dropped significantly.

"Immigrants have always come to the United States for jobs, but before they went to big immigration magnets to be with family or other immigrants," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution who analyzed the numbers, in an interview with The Associated Press. "Now the geography of where these people move is much more tied to the economy than ever before."

In Hidalgo County, where the economy did not show many signs of weakness between 2006 and 2007, estimates showed that the amount of foreign-born residents jumped by 4,800 residents - an increase of more than 2 percent. (2.372 percent) In Cameron County, the number of foreign-born residents increased by more than 1.5 percent. (1.605 percent actually)

The county's total population jumped by just more than 1 percent - with about 710,514 residents in 2007 - the slowest increase of the decade, the survey showed. Still, Hidalgo County's population has jumped by nearly 20 percent since the 2000 Census.

But the amount of detentions in the Rio Grande Valley sector of the U.S. Border Patrol - which stretches from Brownsville to Zapata County and north of Corpus Christi - jumped by about the same amount as the amount of new foreign-born residents in Hidalgo County, as well.

There were 74,504 people apprehended by Border Patrol agents between October 2007 and Sept. 24, 2008, said Daniel Doty, a local Border Patrol spokesman. That also was a 4 percent increase from the year before, Doty said.

Doty said he believes more agents patrolling the area likely contributed to the increase in arrests - not an overall increase of immigrants coming for better opportunities.

"We don't concern ourselves with whether fewer people are coming for a job," Doty said. "We're still going to be out here and looking for the people that breach the border against the law."

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