Aching to Pupate

Femme, feisty, feminist, finding it harder to alliterate than I expected. Twenty-something, vegan, queer, sex- and body-positive, book-loving, Jewish, kinky almost-college graduate. My feminism is intersectional or it isn't worth shit. Directing my life marginally better than a butterfly in a hurricane.

I'm kinda in love with my best friend.

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What the Data Actually Say About Illegal Immigration 

• We are not being flooded with illegal Mexican migrants. The total number of migrants from Mexico has varied very little since the 1950s. The massive influx many have written about never happened.

• Net illegal migration has stopped almost completely.

• Illegal migration has not stopped because of stricter border enforcement, which Massey characterizes as a waste of money at best and counterproductive at worst.

• There are indeed more undocumented Mexicans living in the United States than there were 20 years ago, but that is because fewer migrants are returning home — not because more are sneaking into the country.

• And the reason that fewer Mexican citizens are returning home is because we have stepped up border enforcement so dramatically.

Mull over that last point for a minute. If Congress had done nothing to secure the border over the last two decades — if it had just left the border alone — there might be as many as 2 million fewer Mexicans living in the United States today, Massey believes.

I would only alter this to say that large contingencies of illegal immigrants come from all over Latin America as well as southeast Asia and other areas, not just Mexico, and taking that into account may make the argument of this article even more persuasive.