Yeah, I know the stock market has lost a lot of value.

Still, the malls are packed, people are still buying cars and houses, unemployment is relatively low.

I hear the economic indicators recently showed a 1/2 of 1 percent loss. Whoop-de-do!

Here was the first study that noted immigration numbers were falling. It was first met with incredulity and derision but it has since been confirmed by a number of other studies including some from the other side of the debate like PEW Hispanic.

Illegal Immigrant Population Dropping: New Report Finds Significant Decline Since Last Summer

Additionally, there is tons of evidence that communities that get tough about enforcement experience declining numbers of illegals. This has been repeated over and over in every state or community that gets tough including Arizona, Oklahoma, Colorado, Prince Williams VA and others.

20 – 40 million new democrats can mean Democrat party in controlling congress, executive and judicial branches for 50 to 100 years or more…. It may tick off America but it is a winner for their party and it is all about winning…

I think though that some of the neighboring states have been doing more enforcement…I think I remember seeing some reports about businesses in SoCal being raided just recently.

Anyhow like I said earlier…the economy is not the sole catalyst…this whole thing is a tapestry.

One point of argument might be to look at the numbers of illegals today v. 12 or 18 months ago on a state by state basis. I think – this is just opinion not fact – that you’ll find for Arizona that our numbers are down while neighboring states who aren’t enforcing as we are would be stable or up.

Like I said above, I was merely refuting the idea that self deportation is occurring solely because of the economy. That argument is made so as to totally discount the efforts that have occurred since the CIR debate. I am not just going to sit by and allow someone to discount all the hard work being done by ICE and the Border Patrol to get illegal immigration under control. Granted I don’t think enough has been done yet, but alot has been done none the less.

Anyhow, I would be interested in seeing the correlation in the areas hardest hit by the foreclosures to the dwindling illegal immigrant population. I know that correlation does not equal causation, but it does provide some data that can refute the idea that illegals are merely going south due to hard economic times.

My point is that a crappy US economy will not, in and of itself, keep illegals out because even a crappy US economy is better than a good Mexican economy.

Mea culpa & merry Christmas.

There is no doubt that the areas hardest hit by the subprime crisis also happened to be the areas with the greatest influx of hispanic illegals. And there is no doubt that a larger then their share of the population percentage of subprime mortgages were given to Hispanics. And there is no doubt that a large percentage of the total hispanic population is illegal. From those facts one can infer (but not really know for sure) that illegal aliens were getting mortgages.

Michelle Malkin has been reporting on this for some years. Here is article where she weaves all this together into a believeable story but it is short on actual statistics and facts.

Illegal Immigration and the Mortgage Mess

I know for many years now I have been reading media puff pieces about illegals who were buying homes and putting down roots and living the American Dream and this was one of the reasons why we supposedly had to give them amnesty and could not deport them.

Seriously.

Cuz I gotta tell you: attitudes like this make ~me~ want to go smuggle some non-white-females into your neighborhood just to annoy you.

Merry Christmas, BTW.

There ARE more US citizen willing to take the jobs that illegals have been filling. Due to the economy. As I stated above.

Like it or not everyone, the econonmy is in bad shape and so are the lives of a lot of your fellow Americans due to that very situation.

I completely agree with you, mbecker908, on the obvious point that if we actually made the penalties for the people that hire them extremely painful, and then actually enforced those penalties, more than just the economy would come into play.

When the economy heats back up (especially the housing market) they will swarm back here. Like mbecker said earlier, our economy will always be better than Mexico’s.

The best way to solve this problem is to keep ratcheting up the pressure. It looks like the federal government will never have the balls to take on this problem, so a lot of it will now be from the states. Arizona’s employee sanction law has really dealt a blow to illegal immigrants. My guess is, more and more states will follow suit. Right now is a great time to do something about illegal immigration. When jobs are scarce, the last thing people want is more illegal immigrants taking their jobs.

Going after employers is the best strategy. Illegal immigrants are here for mainly one reason, higher paying jobs. If you cut that off, you’ve essentially solved the problem. Both sides of the aisle can usually form a coalition on this strategy of going after the employers. The Conservative Right who want to defend our nation’s sovereignty, and the Populist/Labor Left that understands illegal immigrants drive down wages.

The reason there are fewer illegals working is because more US citizens are willing to take those jobs at a competitive rate.

You want to reduce the numbers of illegals, make penalties for hiring them overwhelming and improve the ability to catch employers hiring illegals.