Illegal Immigration Overview

Thomas Sowell On Gingrich And Immigration By THOMAS SOWELL 11/28/2011 The purpose of American immigration laws and policies is not to be either humane or inhumane to illegal immigrants. The purpose of immigration laws and policies is to serve the national interest of this country.

There is no inherent right to come live in the United States, in disregard of whether the American people want you here. Nor does the passage of time confer any such right retroactively.

Obama’s Arizona Betrayal By Rick Moran August 5, 2010 Federal statistics showing violent crime actually dropping ^[1] in Arizona counties bordering Mexico are beside the point. The facts still show several disturbing trends that amnesty advocates fail to mention:

Those BLM signs bring home perhaps in a way no other fact or argument can, just how far down the rabbit hole Arizona and the rest of the US have traveled because of federal inaction on stopping the flow of illegal immigrants.

Are these signs ^[6] really posted on the sovereign territory of the United States of America?

... Statistics are meaningless when you’re the one on the front lines fighting to hold back the relentless human tide, but perhaps Sheriff Babeu is referring to the fact ^[10] that 17% of illegal immigrants crossing the border have criminal records. That alone should rouse the federal government from its stupor because up to 30% of illegals do not stay long in the state in which they cross the border, fanning out across the country where the criminal element among them continues their lives of crime — to the detriment of the life and property of residents in non-border states.

Arizona Sheriff: ‘Our Own Government Has Become Our Enemy’ By Penny Starr August 02, 2010
According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), about 250,000 people were detained in Arizona in the last 12 months for being in the country illegally. Babeu said that that number only reflects the number of people detained and that thousands more enter the country illegally each year.

The CBP also reports that 17 percent of those detained already have a criminal record in the United States.

An Immigration Time-Out By John Derbyshire December 15, 2009 Why aren’t we even discussing it?
Now, we have it on the authority of the Pew Research Center pollsters that one Mexican in three would move to the U.S.A., given the opportunity. That would be 37 million, to add to the 12 million Mexican-born residents we already have. Perhaps Goofus thinks that 49 million immigrants from one country would be too much of an imposition on American citizens, and a demographic catastrophe for the sending nation. Why is that jerkish?

And why this favoritism towards Mexicans? They do not live “lives of desperate poverty.” The CIA World Factbook shows a 2008 per capita GDP of $14,300, ranking Mexico as the 79th richest of the 229 jurisdictions listed — richer than Romania, Turkey, and Brazil. To put it another way, there are 140 places in the world poorer than Mexico. Why isn’t it Gallant who’s being a jerk, favoring these comparatively prosperous Mexicans over the much poorer people of Albania ($6,000), Kyrgyzstan ($2,200), Nepal ($1,100), and Zimbabwe ($200)? Why is that not jerkish?

A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States by Jeffrey S. Passel, Senior Demographer, Pew Hispanic Center, and D'Vera Cohn, Senior Writer, Pew Research Center April 14, 2009 Based on March 2008 data collected by the Census Bureau, the Center estimates that unauthorized immigrants are 4% of the nation's population and account for 5.4% of its workforce. Their children, both those who are unauthorized immigrants themselves and those who are U.S. citizens, make up 6.8% of the students enrolled in the nation's elementary and secondary schools.

About three-quarters (76%) of the nation's unauthorized immigrants are Hispanic. The majority of undocumented immigrants (59%) are from Mexico. Significant regional sources of unauthorized immigrants include Asia (11%), Central America (11%), South America (7%), the Caribbean (4%) and the Middle East (less than 2%).

These estimates are based mainly on data from March Current Population Surveys, conducted by the Census Bureau, through 2008, augmented with legal status assignments and adjusted to compensate for undercount; some estimates are from the 1990 and 2000 Censuses. For more details, see the report's Methodology appendix.

Open Borders, Welfare State A Volatile Mix by Phyllis Schlafly May 30, 2008 today's immigrants may be like earlier ones, the America they come to is so very different that our previous experience with immigrants is practically irrelevant.

The essential difference between the two waves of immigrants was best summed up by the Nobel Prize-winning advocate of a free market, Milton Friedman. He said, "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state."

The term "welfare state" does not just mean handouts to the nonworking. Our welfare state encompasses dozens of social programs that provide benefits to the "working poor," i.e., people working for wages low enough they pay little or no income taxes. Link

The Characteristics of Unauthorized Immigrants in California, Los Angeles County, and the United States by Randolph Capps, Karina Fortuny March 06, 2007

California has the largest unauthorized population of any state—almost 2.5 million; almost a quarter of the nation's unauthorized immigrants live there.
There are about 1 million unauthorized immigrants in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, almost twice the number of any other metro area; the unauthorized are one-tenth of the area's population (10 million).
One in 10 California residents is in a family headed by an unauthorized immigrant, compared with one in 20 nationally.
Large majorities of children with unauthorized parents are U.S.-born citizens: 68 percent in California and 76 percent in Los Angeles.
Almost all unauthorized men work, and labor force participation rates are substantially higher for unauthorized men than for legal immigrant or U.S.-born men.
By contrast, labor force participation is much lower for both unauthorized and legal immigrant women than for U.S.-born women, mostly because unauthorized women are more likely to have children.
Unauthorized immigrants represent over a quarter of all workers in many low-skilled occupations in California, especially in Los Angeles.
Unauthorized family incomes are about half of incomes of families headed by U.S.-born citizens, nationally and in California.

Feds Have Built Only 32 Miles of 700 Mile Double-Border Fence Originally Mandated by Congress by Ryan Byrnes Thursday, February 12, 2009 The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has built only 32 miles of double-layer fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border out of the 700 miles originally mandated by a 2006 act of Congress, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

One reason DHS has been able to do this is an amendment that Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R.-Texas) slipped into an omnibus appropriations bill that Congress passed on December 18, 2007. Hutchison’s amendment put a loophole in the fence law that allowed the secretary of Homeland Security not to build the fence Congress had mandated the year before.

On the eve of President Barack Obama's visit to Mexico, recast statistics on Mexican immigrants by the Pew Hispanic Center show that nearly 11 percent of the people born in Mexico live in the United States.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a part of the Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center, today released a statistical profile showing that Mexicans now account for 32 percent of all immigrants in America and more than one out of 10 of all persons born in Mexico live in the U.S.

A record 12.7 million Mexican immigrants lived in the U.S. in 2008, a 17-fold increase since 1970, according to the center. Mexicans comprise about six out of 10 or 59 percent of the estimated 11.9 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S., the center says.

Illegal Immigration Overview by Roger King