Undocumented Immigration: It’s the Economy, Stupid!

The downturn in the U.S. economy is doing something that the expenditures of hundreds of millions of dollars for border fences, more enforcement, immigration raids, detention, etc. for many years could not. Some undocumented immigrants facing bleak job propects are returning to their native lands.  Steve Hendrix of the Washington Post writes about these repatriates and the challenges they face, often returning to a land that they no longer know well and where people view them as “strangers.”

Importantly, the return migration is not putting much of a dent in the 11.9 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.  Those returning are a drop in the bucket to the overall total.  The U.S. economy would REALLY have to collapse for the demand for undocumented labor to greatly reduce the undocumented population.

KJ