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<\/p>\nimmigration
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AG Merrick Garland lets judges pause deportation cases in latest Trump reversal
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GOP Rep takes aim at ‘The Squad’ over ‘ridiculous’ calls to defund immigration enforcement
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DHS chief warns Cubans, Haitians: Don’t try to reach America by boat
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Biden to free pregnant women who crossed border illegally
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Having indulged an unhealthy interest in human migration for decades, I\u2019ve been intrigued by how the number of illegal immigrants that journalists cite as living in the United States never changes. <\/p>\n
For years on end, I\u2019ve read that the population of America\u2019s \u201cundocumented\u201d \u2014 a euphemism that seems to upbraid the receiving country\u2019s bureaucrats for failing to issue its woefully overlooked residents the proper papers \u2014 is 11 million. With the artificial precision that often attends these unverifiable figures, which derive their authority from sheer repetition, some journalists will quote the number as 11.3 million. <\/p>\n
Oh, there was a brief period about 15 years ago when that standard statistic rose to 13 million, but then it popped right back down to 11 again, without any headlines about a stampede of 2 million suddenly ploughing over the Mexican border in the southern direction. <\/p>\n
But how do our well-informed correspondents know how many immigrants live illegally in the US? That 11.3 million figure originates from the Census Bureau\u2019s annual American Community Survey.\u201d <\/p>\n
But these are the very residents notoriously averse to responding to census inquiries, regardless of assurances that being counted won\u2019t lead to an unwelcome knock on the door from the cold-hearted immigration heavies at ICE. \u201cIrregular\u201d migrants have a vested interest in remaining invisible. Should you ask a crowd of such people, \u201cWho\u2019s not supposed to be here?\u201d funnily enough nobody\u2019s likely to raise a hand. <\/p>\n
A TRIO of academics affiliated with MIT and Yale University set about trying to reproduce that oft-quoted statistic by other means. Their results were published in 2018. Employing a range of operational stats (such as deportations and visa overstays) and other demographic data (such as death rates and immigration rates) from 1990 to 2016, they first fed their computer model the most conservative assumptions possible. <\/p>\n
As the study\u2019s authors anticipated arriving at a number well below that eternally unchanging 11.3 million, confirmation bias alone would have helped produce a lowball estimate. Instead, even with all the inputs rigged at improbably low levels, the model still generated a population of illegal immigrants in the US of 16.7 million \u2014 50 percent higher. <\/p>\n
The modelers were astonished. As an on-again, off-again New Yorker, I\u2019m not. <\/p>\n
Yet the full range of their model\u2019s outputs is more astonishing still. Accepting, unlike most journalists, that their data contained a large degree of uncertainty, the authors ran their model with a variety of credible inputs literally a million times. The results within a 95 percent probability lay between 16 million and 29 million, with 22.1 million as the mean \u2014 or twice as many illegal immigrants as the Census Bureau figures imply. <\/p>\n
Mind, that Yale\/MIT model produced half a million results in excess of 22.1\u2009million, with a multitude spitting out estimates in the vicinity of 35 million or more. That would be more than 10 percent of the total American population, which experientially sounds about right. <\/p>\n
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While the study also verifies that these numbers have been relatively stable since 2008, under the Biden administration the total has begun to rise. <\/p>\n
It matters how many illegal immigrants are truly living in the US, because President Biden has ambitions to offer them all a de facto amnesty and a path to citizenship. Should the president get his way and, say, 35 million people rather than the expected 11 million emerge from the shadows to apply for legal status, the political backlash could be considerable \u2014 including from legal immigrants and naturalized citizens, who went to a great deal of bother to follow the rules. <\/p>\n
Unchecked immigration is already the Achilles heel of this presidency. With grand humanitarian fanfare, Biden has reversed virtually all of former President Trump\u2019s more restrictive policies, effectively helicoptering \u201cWelcome to the United States!\u201d flyers all over Latin America.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In May alone, the border patrol \u201cencountered\u201d more than 180,000 migrants. This financial year, with four months to go, the force has detained nearly 1 million migrants, more than double the number of the previous full financial year under Trump. That\u2019s only the people they catch. <\/p>\n
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So far, Biden\u2019s answer to the crisis is to build more detention centers, which is like trying to solve the obesity epidemic by building more Burger Kings. <\/p>\n
Awarded the brimming poisoned chalice of responsibility for the southern border, Vice President Kamala Harris has claimed repeatedly that the solution is to address migration\u2019s \u201croot causes.\u201d <\/p>\n
But were there a button to make the whole of Central America prosperous, law-abiding and justly governed, someone would have pressed it long ago. <\/p>\n
When visiting the region last month, Harris\u2019 stern injunction to this restive population \u2014 \u201cDo not come!\u201d \u2014 is apt to prove as fiendishly effective as Nancy Reagan\u2019s \u201cJust say no to drugs.\u201d <\/p>\n
I\u2019m not persuaded that the Democratic Party is necessarily scheming to import future Democratic voters with porous borders. Rather, Biden desperately wants to court a reputation for being nice, in contrast to his meanie predecessor. <\/p>\n
But an aspiration to kindliness is at diametric odds with enforcing immigration laws. Americans poll broadly as supportive only of controlled immigration, and this administration has no idea how to exert any control whatsoever while drowning in all that niceness. <\/p>\n
To disguise the fact that immigration to the States is now a free-for-all, we\u2019re sure to keep hearing about America\u2019s imaginary \u201c11 million undocumented immigrants,\u201d despite copious evidence that this farcically tiny figure is a lie. Legitimizing two to three times that number, with thousands more arriving every day, would be a harder sell. <\/p>\n
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The economist Bryan Caplan maintains that the US should take in a billion immigrants this century \u2014 never mind its perilous national water shortage; this summer\u2019s severe western drought demonstrates the difficulty of supporting America\u2019s population as is. But then, it\u2019s no accident that Caplan\u2019s graphic nonfiction book, \u201cOpen Borders,\u201d is a cartoon. <\/p>\n