By Brad Bernstein
President, The Law Offices of Spar & Bernstein
http://www.4immigration.com/
Amid all the hysteria these days about the alarming number of illegal immigrants, the fiery rhetoric about how America’s border states are being overrun by Mexican drug dealers, the fingers of blame pointing squarely at immigrants for stealing jobs and ruining the economy, along comes this heavy – and unignorable – dose of reality.
According to new study released Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group, the influx of illegal immigrants plunged to an estimated 300,000 annually between March 2007 and 2009, from 850,000 a year between March 2000 and March 2005.
We’re sure that anti-immigrant loudmouths like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, the Tea Partiers, as well as the opportunistic politicians who’ve used illegal immigration as nothing but political currency, will find a way to dispute this number somehow, will cut the head off the messenger by impugning the integrity of the Pew Hispanic Center, will accuse PHC of skewing things to carry out an agenda.
It’s just oh so predictable by now.
I mean, these are people who simply won’t let facts get in the way of their mouth-foaming rants.
According to the Pew analysis, which is based on data from the Census Bureau, the decline contributed to a contraction in the overall size of the undocumented population to 11 million people in March 2009 from a peak of 12 million two years earlier. And it went on to say that from 2008 to 2009, illegal immigrants decreased in two states – Virginia and Florida – whose attorney generals are proposing to make into law immigration policies even more Draconian than Arizona’s unseemly – and thankfully, now eviscerated – SB 1070.
Interesting, huh?
Amazing how a little light exposes the cockroaches.
So let them all scream about tighter border control and more deportations, the facts now scream back a different story.
