The decreases were biggest in states like California, Florida, and New York.
From 2007 to 2016, the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico, South America, the Caribbean, Africa, Europe and Canada fell.
The number from Central America increased, but only by about 300,000 total (over 9 years).
These new numbers prove, yet again, that the Caravan, the families Trump separated, etc. are the tiny last gasp of a phenomenon that mostly ended over a decade ago.
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More data, more facts!
Here's a list of states where the unauthorized immigrant population changed, and how much it changed by, over the last decade.
Some people have tried to estimate the number of unauthorized immigrants that govt. surveys miss, based on entry/exit numbers.
They find a higher total population of unauthorized immigrants, but the same decline - or a BIGGER decline - starting in 2007. journals.plos.org/plosone/articl…
Deportations peaked in 2013 under Obama, who focused on deporting criminals and recent entrants rather than law-abiding long-term residents.
Unauthorized immigrants are a little less than a quarter of the foreign-born population. They are about 3.3 percent of the entire United States population.
The collapse and reversal of illegal immigration is due mainly to Mexico, though the trend holds for almost all sending countries (Mexico was just by far the biggest).
It's now basically down to just Honduras/Guatemala/El Salvador.
The collapse and reversal of illegal immigration seems to have been triggered by the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007. BUT, thanks to low Mexican fertility and higher Mexican per capita GDP, the trend held even as the economy recovered.
Obama's vigorous border enforcement, with record deportations, family detention (vox.com/2018/6/21/1748… …). and use of force at the border (newsweek.com/obama-administ… …), might also have been a factor in stopping illegal immigration from rebounding after the recession ended.
Looking at the data and the history, I cannot reasonably conclude that illegal immigration should be an important issue in the United States today.
It seems to me to be a nothingburger. A vehicle for posturing, rhetoric, and status politics, not a real policy challenge.
Illegal immigration now seems to me to be nothing more than a symbolic flashpoint in the much larger battle over race and belonging in America - over who gets to be a "real American".
That is a very important battle. But it's not really about illegal immigration.
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About 8% of students have participated in the protests on one side or the other. That's a substantial number, but less than the 21% who joined BLM protests in May/June 2020 (and the latter were pretty much all on one side of the issue).
The Palestine protesters have created a dream Palestine that is almost entirely disconnected from the real place, in which all of their fantasies of a perfect society are realized.
Most weebs don't actually want to live in Japan. They want to live in a local subculture of their own creation, whose values are based on gentleness and romance -- the ideals that attracted them to Japanese fantasies and made those fantasies resonate.
Comparisons between the Cultural Revolution and the Woke Era get laughed at. The Woke Era didn't use violence, of course. But the *motivation* of people wanting to overturn social hierarchies, especially students wanting to overturn academic hierarchies, is recognizably similar.
In 2010s America, there was a widespread desire to overturn local social hierarchies -- the classroom authority of teachers and professors, the cultural power of entertainment stars, the authority of nonprofit execs and heads of civic organizations.
In 1960s China, overturning local hierarchies happened via physical mob violence. In 2010, it happened through online mobs destroying people's reputations on social media. Obviously, the second is far preferable to the first. This is why economic development is good!
1. They engender material equality more efficiently than any other economic intervention, and
2. They create an equality of respect, through the habit of mutual use.
Although rich people may pay more for a train or a park, when they ride the train or walk in the park, they are equal in social status to everyone else on the train or in the park.
This creates a feeling of equality throughout society.
1/Here's a thread in which the Economist's Mike Bird tries to rebut my recent post about decoupling. I think this thread is useful for understanding why the doubters are making the mistakes that they're making.