Thread: Half A Loaf On Labor Day 2009: With Jobs Down, Illegals Are

Half A Loaf On Labor Day 2009: With Jobs Down, Illegals Are Leaving

By Joe Guzzardi

Immigration reform patriots have finally gotten what we have for years longed for.

By all accounts, aliens living illegally in the U.S. are returning home while would-be aliens have chosen to stay put in their native country.

But the trend represents only a partial triumph because the U.S. legal immigrant population remains stable.

Still, half a loaf is better than none!

In its July 2009 report, A Shifting Tide: Recent Trends in the Illegal Immigrant, the Center for Immigration Studies analysts Steven Camarota and Karen Jensenius found that because of a combination of interior enforcement and a recession that eliminated the jobs magnet:

The illegal population declined 13.7 percent (1.7 million) from a peak of 12.5 million in the summer of 2007 to 10.8 million in the first quarter of 2009.

The number of new illegal immigrants arriving has fallen by about one-third in the last two years compared to earlier in this decade.

The number of illegal immigrants returning has more than doubled in the last two years compared to earlier in this decade.

Another indication that enforcement has played a role in the decline is that the illegal immigrant population began falling before there was a significant rise in their unemployment rate.

Unemployment among illegal immigrants has increased dramatically and plays a significant role in reducing their numbers.

The illegal population rose in the summer of 2007, the period when Congress was considering an amnesty to legalizing illegal immigrants. When that legislation failed to pass, the illegal population quickly fell dramatically. [A Shifting Tide: Recent Trends in the Illegal Immigrant Population, Center for Immigration Studies, July 2009]

The CIS conclusions validate what we at VDARE.COM have been saying all along: if the U.S. eliminates the job pull factor and at the same time vigorously applies interior enforcement efforts, then a large part of the illegal alien invasion ends.

We have also insisted that amnesty—even the hint of it—generates more illegal immigration.

Unfortunately, much of the alien job loss has not been related to enforcement but the severe economic recession.

But when good times return, the same results (blocking aliens from the job market) can be achieved by implementing E-Verify as well as imposing serious fines that include lengthy jail sentences and hefty fines for employers who continue to break federal immigration laws.

By returning home, illegal immigrants shatter another long-standing myth.

For years, immigration enthusiasts have argued that, once aliens arrive in America, they immediately put down roots that within short time anchor them to the U.S. and make it impossible for them to leave.

Furthermore, the immigration enthusiasts insist that, when aliens are forced to return home either voluntarily because of job loss or involuntarily by deportation, cruel and unusual punishment is inflicted upon them.

I counter that going home is the best thing that can happen to them.

Here’s a CNN story that proves my point.

Pedro Pablo is an illegal immigrant from Guatemala who has worked a total of three days in the last year. When he first arrived in Los Angeles several years ago after leaving his wife and three children, Pablo found plenty of jobs.

Now that he’s not been working for months and is destitute, Pablo got a bus ticket paid for by the Guatemalan consulate and left.

Jeronimo Salguero [Email him] oversees a Los Angeles day labor site and helps out at the consulate. According to Salguero, the consulate routinely buys bus tickets for Guatemalans like Pablo eager to go home.

Salguero claimed that the unemployed Guatemalans are “Completely desperate. Each day I have workers coming into the office and say: ‘Geronimo, help me. I want to go back to my country.’â€

Under former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff (I told you we would miss him!), work place raids increased significantly.

You got that right! I'm starting to miss Bush too!