The Illegal Immigration Problem is Taking Care of Itself

I've been meaning to write about this as another in a series of posts highlighting Trump's xenophobic insanity, but it works just as well if the Republican nominee turns out to be Ted Cruz.  He's equally nuts about 'securing our borders' --- he just doesn't get as much media attention for it.

The fact of the matter is that illegal immigration is an amazingly complex subject with no easy answers.  That's why it works so well for anti-immigration zealots like Trump and Cruz.  Their 'throw 'em all out and build a wall' rhetoric stokes the emotions of bigotry and xenophobia which live in most everyone --- just more strongly in some than in others, thank goodness --- and proposes a simple solution to a complex problem.  In short, railing against the 'other' feels good and requires no thought, so it's easy to latch onto that idea, especially in a crowd of like-minded people.

However, if you're interested in finding actual solutions to the problem of illegal immigration, that requires a lot of time and effort and thought and consensus-building, and almost no one wants to do that.  So unfortunately, the anti-immigrant position will always be a winner for guys like Trump and Cruz.

However, there is one counter-argument to those guys which might give their supporters pause.  And that is, no matter the real or perceived ills of illegal immigration, those ills should be on the downswing, at least so far as the Mexican border is concerned.  This is because more undocumented Mexicans are leaving the U.S. than entering --- and in fact, this exodus back to Mexico has been going on for nearly a decade now.

Another pet peeve of anti-immigration forces is birthright citizenship, the clause in the Fourteenth Amendment providing that anyone born on U.S. soil is automatically a U.S. citizen.  Birthright citizenship is absolutely essential in a free democracy --- this is a Thing Everyone probably doesn't Know but should --- but that's a topic for another day.  However, if you disagree with birthright citizenship, it may comfort you to learn that the number of babies born to illegal immigrants has also been steadily falling for nearly a decade.

We can argue about whether illegal immigration is a serious problem or not, but one thing that's beyond dispute is that it's a much smaller problem than it was in 2007.  So perhaps we can wait a while on building that wall.