Pew Study: Illegal Immigration Falls By 500,000

Posted on October 2, 2008
Filed Under Immigration |

We have more evidence showing that the crackdown on illegal immigration is working:

The illegal immigrant population has stopped growing, according to a report out Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center.
The number of illegal immigrants in the USA rose for much of the decade to a peak of 12.4 million last year, from 8.4 million in 2000, according to Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at the center, a non-partisan research organization. Passel’s analysis of Census data shows there are 11.9 million illegal immigrants in the country this year.

Despite the overall growth, fewer illegal immigrants are now entering the country each year compared with earlier in the decade. “We’ve measured a significant slowdown,” he says.

From 2000 to 2005, the report says, an average of 800,000 illegal immigrants entered the USA each year. Since then, an average of 500,000 have arrived annually.

“Each year seems to be less than the year before,” he says. “If we look at the most recent one to two years, there’s no indications of growth.”

The number of illegal immigrants entering each year has dipped below the number of newly arrived legal permanent residents for the first time in a decade, Passel says.

Now it is true, however, that the law enforcement crackdown on illegal immigration is not the only reason for the decline in the illegal population. The current economic climate certainly is a factor.

William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution, a centrist Washington think tank, cautions against giving too much credit to enforcement. He believes fewer illegal immigrants are coming because jobs are disappearing .

“Illegal immigrants follow the networks of their friends and families,” he says. “They hear about jobs drying up and they decide this isn’t the time to come.”

I know this economic crisis is just that–a crisis–but on the illegal immigration front it ought to be seen as a benefit and an opportunity to pass a truly comprehensive immigration reform bill. Now I’m not talking about a President Bush, Senators McCain and Kennedy type of amnesty bill. I’m talking about a bill that is grounded in conservative principles like several states have enacted–Oklahoma, Arizona, Georgia.

The slowing economy has decreased the illegal population by half a million. That’s half a million people we don’t have to deport and that we can now try to prevent from returning illegally when the economy picks back up. But we will only succeed by getting federal legislation that is based on the model employed by the states listed above.

The illegal immigration issue is one in which our current economic conditions present an opportunity to significantly reduce the number of illegals in the country.

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