One of the talking points of the pro-amnesty crowd is that immigration is stabilizing or even declining, and thus is no longer an acute problem. Illegal immigration is down and Mexican immigration is supposedly net zero or even negative. Therefore the only remaining reason to persist in opposing “comprehensive immigration reform” is bigotry, nativism, blah, blah, blah.
Well, it turns out that immigration is surging. Newly released data from the Census Bureau shows that 1.5 million immigrants, legal and illegal, moved here in 2014, up 17 percent from the prior year, and up 38 percent from 2011. Data for the first six months of 2015 suggest last year’s total was even higher, at 1.6 million.
Between one-quarter and one-third of the 1.5 million new arrivals in 2014 were illegal aliens, meaning that a conservative estimate is that 1,000 illegal aliens a day are moving to the United States. Other research suggests more than half of these new illegals are overstaying temporary visas rather than infiltrating across the borders. A thousand new illegals a day is indeed a lower level that the spike a decade ago, but it can hardly be described as success – and, in any case, the number is climbing again.
The total immigrant population reached a record 43.3 million in 2015. Another sign of the surge is that the total grew twice as fast during 2013-2015 as it did during the previous four-year period.
One part of the “don’t-worry-pass-amnesty” narrative that’s true is the drop off in Mexican immigration. Although the number of new immigrants from Mexico grew in 2014, and was higher than any year since 2009, it’s still less than half the level of the early 2000s. That’s mostly because there’s just not that many potential migrants left in the Mexican countryside, most of them having already moved to the city – either their own cities or one of ours.
But – and I know this comes as a surprise to some politicians – there are about 7 billion potential immigrants living outside Mexico. That’s why immigration from Asia, from Africa & the Mideast, and from non-Mexico Latin America is more than making up for the decline in Mexican immigration. Arrivals from non-Mexico Latin America in 2014 were up 71 percent from 2011, while immigration from East & South Asia and from Africa & the Middle East were each up 33 percent. The large majority of the world’s people are poorer than the average Mexican, and cheap transportation makes it easier than ever for them to get to our borders.
The specific sending countries that had the biggest percentage increases were Saudi Arabia (up 115 percent since 2010), Bangladesh (up 49 percent), Nigeria (up 48 percent), and Egypt and Iraq (each up 35 percent).
The policy upshot is this: The demand for immigration to the United States is, for all practical purposes, infinite. Eternal vigilance is the price not only of liberty, but of nationhood itself.