Thread: Peter Schrag: What's driving illegal immigrants home?

Peter Schrag: What's driving illegal immigrants home?
By Peter Schrag - pschrag@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Though it hasn't got much notice, there's now fairly wide agreement that the number of illegal immigrants in the United States has declined by a hefty 10 percent or more in the past year or so.

But that's pretty much where the agreement stops. Are Mexicans and other illegal aliens being driven home by tougher enforcement, as immigration restrictionists claim? Or is the decline in illegal aliens – from an estimated 12 million-plus to just over 11 million – a trailing indicator of the recession and accompanying decrease in employment opportunities?

In a report issued July 30, the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors tighter restrictions and tougher enforcement, sees the decline at least partly as the result of stepped-up federal raids on workplaces, especially in the Midwest, of the augmented checks at the southern border, and of hundreds of new local and state laws targeting illegal aliens.

But the CIS' "dubious conclusion," counters the liberal Immigration Policy Center, "is undermined not only by an absence of hard data, but by the faulty logic and contradictory statements of the report itself."

CIS research director Steven Camorata, who wrote the report on the basis of his extrapolation of census data, acknowledges that the shrinking job market was at least partially responsible for the decline. But he contends that because the number of illegal residents shrank even before the labor market tightened – but after enforcement got tougher – enforcement is working as intended.

The difficulty with that argument is that jobs in many of the sectors that had high concentrations of illegal workers – construction, particularly – began to evaporate before those in other sectors of economy.

Border enforcement, moreover, began to be tightened in the early 1990s, which, in the estimation of many researchers including those at the impartial Public Policy Institute of California, generated a sharp increase in the numbers of illegal aliens.

When the border was more open, those researchers point out, illegal workers migrated seasonally, returning home during the lean months. As enforcement became tougher with the addition of many more Border Patrol agents, and billions in new fences and electronic gadgetry, crossing became more expensive and dangerous. As a result, hundreds of thousands who had once gone home decided to stay and sent for their families, becoming permanent, sometimes unwilling, immigrants.

In June, Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California, San Diego, issued another report concluding that illegal immigration has always responded to changing U.S. economic conditions, not to political policy.

There have never before been as many illegal workers in packing plants and other non-agricultural jobs, where federal agents can round them up as conveniently as they have in the past year. Nor have those enforcement efforts been as harsh as they have in the May raid on the Agriprocessors meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa, where nearly 400 people were detained.

About 270, most of them Guatemalans, were charged not with ordinary immigration violations but with "aggravated identity theft." Begging to be sent home to families that depend on them and not understanding the charges or process they were caught in, they made plea deals with prosecutors and were summarily convicted and sentenced to five months in federal prisons. Many of their families still don't know where they are.

That those workers, some as young as 13, others parents with children, were willing to work in the brutal, dangerous and abusive conditions that have since been revealed at the Iowa plant – conditions almost surely not unique there – makes it more than probable that fear of detention, even with the harsh new federal methods, pales next to the desperate risks of the work itself.

Would American workers ever be willing to take jobs under the conditions at plants like Agriprocessors? Camarota acknowledges that the arrests, imprisonment and deportation of workers like those at Postville are not the single most important source of the decline in illegal immigrants. The Spanish-language press, he says, acting as an inadvertent megaphone for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, has scared them off.

If he's correct, it begs the question of how cruel enforcement has to be to drive the other 11 million out of the country. Camarota agrees that because of the political clout of employers, enforcement has hit workers much harder. He also acknowledges that those who have left in the past year – and those who didn't replace them – may be "low-hanging fruit" on trees where few easy pickings are left.

On the other hand, if it's the shortage of jobs that sent those illegal aliens home, it undermines the pleas of employers that they're suffering a serious shortage of workers. Maybe with better pay and conditions, Americans could be found for at least some of those jobs.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/1149191.html

Originally Posted by zeezil

Peter Schrag: What's driving illegal immigrants home?

On the other hand, if it's the shortage of jobs that sent those illegal aliens home, it undermines the pleas of employers that they're suffering a serious shortage of workers. Maybe with better pay and conditions, Americans could be found for at least some of those jobs.
http://www.sacbee.com/110/story/1149191.html

I about fell on the floor after reading this. Peter Schrag used to be 100% pro-illegal, now he thinks Americans should be hired? I guess all the money the SAC Bee is losing must be having an effect!