The good news is that illegal immigration from Mexico is now effectively zero. The bad news is why:
As I have frequently argued that we are probably at a turning point, and will never again see immigration from Mexico at the huge rates that prevailed from 1983 to 2007. Among the reasons: Mexico has been growing more prosperous, its birth rates declined sharply two decades ago and it now has a middle class majority (as former Foreign Minister Jorge Castañeda argues in his 2011 book Mañana Forever?). For some years I feared that Mexico could not achieve higher economic growth than the United States since our economies have been tied so tightly together by NAFTA since 1993. But in the past two years Mexico’s growth rate has been on the order of 5% to 7%. It’s looking like Mexico’s growth rate is tied not to that of the United States but to that of Texas, which has been a growth leader because of its intelligent public policies which have prevented public employee unions from plundering the private sector economy.
Of course, other states are free to adopt "intelligent public policies," too, but that's another post. If he's right that illegal immigration is never going to be as big a deal again, maybe that's a chance for us to step back and rethink our overall immigration policies, which border on the incoherent and don't exactly put out the welocme mat for legal immigrants.
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Tuesday night, Condi Rice was speaking on immigration at Duke, saying "I don't know when immigrants became the enemy."
Immigrants generally result in less unemployment rather than more; they create small businesses, for one thing, that end up hiring non-immigrants for (among other things) their language skills.
The reason Social Security is in trouble is the dropping birth rate; more and more retirees are being supported by fewer and fewer working-age people. Immigration replaces those children we were too selfish to conceive, and what's more, it saves up the cost of 12 years of education. (And Joe Scarborough repeatedly says that every college diploma granted to a non-citizen should have an application for citizenship stapled to it.)
"That immigrant culture that has renewed us ... has been at the core of our strength", Condi says.
Boy, wouldn't Condi make a good vice-presidential candidate? And with luck, Mitt would decide to retire in October, so she'd become the presidential candidate instead. Now there is a ham sandwich that could beat Obama!