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What Crisis?

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Matthew Denhart

Tim Noah, The New Republic I hate to interrupt a good brawl. But, while politicians and Supreme Court justices debate how, and at what level of...

Tim Noah, The New Republic I hate to interrupt a good brawl. But, while politicians and Supreme Court justices debate how, and at what level of government, to halt the national crisis of illegal immigration, it might be worth considering whether the crisis has, um, passed. The Pew Hispanic Center recently issued a report stating, “[T]he net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped and may have reversed.” The report got some pickup in the press but not nearly as much as you might think. When we talk about immigration, we are talking often about Mexico, because it accounts for the largest proportion (30 percent) of America’s 40 million immigrants. (China places a distant second with 5 percent.) And, when we talk about illegal immigration, we are talking mostly about Mexico, because it supplies fully 59 percent of America’s estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants. (Here, El Salvador places an even-more distant second with 6 percent.) Most of the Mexicans who migrated to the United States during the past four decades arrived here illegally (though many subsequently acquired legal status). Read More