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.
(end)
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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Feel like Blu*sky is a microcosm for all of American liberalism right now. The entire left-of-center became defined by cancel culture. Now the spaces where that culture exists are shrinking under external attack, but everyone on the left just stays within those shrinking spaces.
There was this big idea that social media was this infinitely powerful tool that allowed a small # of progressives to shame a huge number of Americans into accepting their values. For a decade it seemed to be working. But it overreached and collapsed.
But progressives got addicted to that seemingly infinite power. They forgot everything else. They forgot how to persuade. They forgot how to organize. They forgot how to compromise. They thought the only tool they would ever need again was heckling and shunning on social media.
2/Most of the discourse around China in Western media these days is about U.S.-China competition (e.g. this podcast by @DKThomp and @RushDoshi). But I thought I'd write about something a little more positive -- the idea that China is building The Future.
2/After Covid, there was a general sense that America needed to be REBUILT -- not just from the pandemic, but from the aftermath of the Great Recession, the Rust Belt, and decades of institutional decay.
3/People argued about HOW to rebuild America. Naturally, progressives thought it would be more government-directed, while conservatives thought it would come from the private sector and from defense spending.
This is a very subtle and interesting question. It seems clear that right-wing interest in personal health is a response to the terrible health of non-college Americans. And the rightists are trying to invent an alternative approach that resists the hegemony of academia.
The fact is, college-educated Americans tend to be hypocritical about health. They watch what they eat, get lots of exercise, and try to eat "organic", but they preach fat acceptance and a disability-based approach to poor health. Rightists don't know how to deal with that.
In fact, this is representative of a broader pattern. College-educated progressives get married and stay marriage, but denigrate the idea of marriage. They work hard but denigrate the idea of hard work. Their personal success is based on rampant, galloping hypocrisy.
1/Here's something a lot of people I talk to don't understand about Japanese urbanism, and why Japanese cities are so special.
2/Japanese cities feel different than big, dense cities elsewhere -- NYC, London, and Paris, but also other Asian cities like Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Singapore.
There are many reasons for this, but today I'll focus on one: Zakkyo buildings.
3/When many people think of "mixed-use development", they think of stores on the first floor, apartments on the higher floors. This is sometimes called "shop-top housing" or "over-store apartments".
This is how most cities in the world do mixed-use development.