Enforcement at work: the strategy of attrition is bearing fruit

National Review, August 4, 2008 by Mark Krikorian

But they're not all going to other states. A forthcoming report by my colleague Steven Camarota at the Center for Immigration Studies has found a measurable drop in the total illegal population since last year, with most of them leaving on their own rather than being deported.

The open-borders crowd acknowledges that illegals are leaving, but claims that this development merely buttresses their assertion that immigration is mainly a market-driven phenomenon--when the economy goes sour, illegals go home. Nice try, but there's more to it than that. First, the illegals themselves say otherwise; in the words of one illegal leaving in anticipation of Arizona's tough law, "I don't want to live here because of the new law and the oppressive environment."

An April survey of immigrants from Latin America (half of them illegal) conducted by the Inter-American Development Bank found the same result--28 percent of respondents said they were considering returning home and 81 percent said it was harder to find a job. The role of enforcement came out when respondents were asked whether they considered "discrimination against immigrants" a major problem, and two-thirds said yes. Since that was almost double the proportion who answered yes in a survey in 2001, it's clear that the "discrimination" they're referring to is the enhanced enforcement of the immigration laws, a point reinforced by the fact that illegals were much more likely to point to this "discrimination" than naturalized citizens.

The population data also point in the same direction. While unemployment among illegals has indeed gone up, no doubt contributing to their decisions to leave, the above-mentioned Camarota study finds that the drop in the illegal population has been accompanied by a continuing increase in the legal immigrant population. What's more, the decline in the illegal population seems to have begun with the collapse of the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill in the Senate, before there was a significant rise in the unemployment rate for illegals. As one Brazilian said of his illegal countrymen in Massachusetts, "When the immigration bill didn't go through, people were very disappointed and started buying tickets [to return home]."

There's plenty more to do--we need better marketing for enforcement programs and more funding for state and local police actions, as well as full implementation of the check-in/checkout system at the borders (called US-VISIT) to limit visa overstays, which account for as much as half the illegal population.

But as important as such measures are to accelerating the Gran Salida, the first priority has to be to prevent the current enforcement push from being discontinued by the next president. The success of attrition is an inconvenient truth, as it were, for the amnesty crowd. But since the top immigration priority for both McCain and Obama is legalization of the illegal population (McCain told Hispanic officials that "it would be my top priority yesterday, today, and tomorrow"), anything that gets in the way of that goal is a threat.