Immigration Update
Curb Your Enthusiasm. Illegal Immigration and the Border Crisis are Definitely NOT Under Control
With immigration taking center stage in the 2016 campaign, there has been a noticeable counter-campaign mounted by the Obama administration, its allied think tanks, and some in the media.
First, there was a Pew Research study that the illegal alien population of the U.S. has declined to a (mere) 10.9 million – a “precipitous drop,” according to the Washington Post. Even if it were true, 10.9 million people is about 700,000 people more than live in Georgia, the nation’s eighth most populous state. A quick survey of visa overstays and illegal border crossing data raise serious doubts that the illegal population is in decline, never mind dropping precipitously.
Then there was last week’s headline in Politico announcing “Illegal border crossings by families drop sharply in January” – a 65 percent reduction in families with children and a 54 percent drop in unaccompanied minors from December levels. Assuming those figures are accurate, one month’s data is about as useful in determining a trend as a one-day fluctuation in the Dow Jones average.
Even the Democratic congressman representing the South Texas district that has borne the brunt of the border surge isn’t buying the happy talk. Rep. Henry Cuellar responded to the inference that January’s numbers indicate that the surge of Central American migrants is ebbing. “While the number of unaccompanied children and family units apprehended along our southern border in January is down 36 percent from the month before, we should not take this to mean that the overall situation has been solved. If you look at the overall trajectory of apprehensions along the border over a longer time span, and not just a single month, you will see that that there has been a 171 percent increase in the number of family units apprehended at the border this fiscal year over the same period last fiscal year and a 102 percent increase in the number of unaccompanied children,” Cuellar said in a press release.