In July, my colleague Steve Camarota estimated the size of the illegal-alien population in the first quarter of 2009 at 10.8 million. The Office of Immigration Statistics at DHS today released its own estimate of the illegal-alien population as of January 2009 and it’s . . . 10.8 million.

First of all, it’s good to have the results of our own research confirmed by the government. Second, it’s nice to have beaten the government to the punch by six months. And this isn’t because my researchers are better than their researchers; the analysts at DHS and the Census Bureau and elsewhere are quite skilled and capable. Rather, they’re part of a large bureacuracy, and a government one to boot, so things necessarily move at a glacial pace.

I think that second point is important for conservatives in particular to keep in mind as we make jokes about “non-essential personnel” not reporting to work on federal government snow days. We’re likely to have more success in making the case for downsizing government if we acknowledge the truth that these agencies we want to abolish (HUD, SBA, USDA, HHS, DoT, etc., etc., etc.) are full of very capable people whose productivity and potential contributions to the economy are stunted by the bureaucracies they’re part of. The Washington area has the highest proportion of people with a bachelor’s degree of any major metro area (behind only a few college towns like Boulder, Ithaca, and Ann Arbor); after the initial dislocation caused by abolishing these agencies, the presence of that pool of talent would lead to an economic boom — a real, private-sector boom, not the parasitic one we’ve been experiencing in Washington.