By Caitlin Webber, CQ Staff
The Hispanic illegal immigrant population has significantly declined in the previous year because of stepped-up enforcement efforts and, secondarily, a slower economy, says a report released Wednesday by the Center for Immigration Studies.
CIS, which favors reduced immigration levels, used Census Bureau data to report that the population of young, uneducated Hispanic illegal immigrants might have decreased by 11 percent from its peak in August 2007 to May 2008.
"The study challenges the argument that there's no way illegal immigrants will go home and that you can't deport them all, that it's not practical," Steven A. Camarota, director of research for CIS and lead author of the report, said Wednesday in an interview.
Immigrant and Hispanic advocacy questioned the study's methodology and said its conclusions have dangerous policy implications.
"CIS implies that the illegal immigrant population could drop to half of what it is now within the next five years if only presidential candidates keep silent about the details of comprehensive immigration reform, taxpayers continue to pour billions of dollars into enforcement, and the U.S. economic recession persists," Angela Kelley, director of the Immigration Policy Center, said in a statement.
According to the CIS analysis, the number of illegal immigrants who voluntarily left the country in the last 10 months was at least seven times larger than the number deported by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
"This indicates that you don't need to deport everybody, that you can really make a dent in this problem by conveying to folks that the immigration law is back to business," Camarota said.
The report, "Homeward Bound: Recent Immigration Enforcement and the Decline in the Illegal Alien Population," also links a temporary summer 2007 swell in the illegal immigrant population to congressional consideration of comprehensive immigration legislation that eventually failed.
Camarota said CIS researchers found this "hump . . . the most surprising thing in the study."
Explaining that inbound and outbound migrations are typically constant, the report says it is likely that the incoming groups grew and fewer immigrants left the country during the heavy mainstream and Spanish media coverage of Senate action on an immigration bill that collapsed late June 2007. It argues that many illegal immigrants likely believed they would benefit from the eventual path to citizenship included in the failed bill (S 1348).
"This tends to suggest that public pronouncements and statements have consequences," Camarota said. "That's why I have no confidence that these trends will continue, I think that the pronouncements by the presidential candidates will also have consequences."
While allowing that an economic downturn could be discouraging immigration, the report highlights enforcement as the more prominent factor by demonstrating that the current immigrant decline is much larger than occurred during the March-November 2001 recession.
"There is a significant drop-off before the rise in unemployment. We've never seen that before," Camarota said. "The dip has always happened after a spike in unemployment."
House Judiciary Committee ranking Republican Lamar Smith of Texas said the study demonstrates that no new laws are needed.
"Today's report proves that America does not need new immigration laws, comprehensive immigration reform or amnesty -- which only encourages more illegal immigration," Smith said. "Congress and the administration simply need to ensure that our immigration laws are enforced and our border secured."
Correlation and Causation
Pro-immigration rights groups first took aim at the report's research methods.
"The authors report confidently about a population that is nearly impossible to accurately measure," Kelley said.
The report used monthly Census Bureau surveys for which there is an assumed 10 percent undercount and only sampled young, uneducated Hispanic illegal immigrants.
Just counting foreign-born Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 40 and using that as a proxy for undocumented immigrants doesn't really work," Douglas Rivlin, spokesman for the National Immigration Forum, said in an interview.
CIS says it's confident its results accurately reflect the Hispanic illegal immigrant population, but do concede that as one of the study's limitations "it is unclear what is happening to the other 20 percent of illegal immigrants who are primarily from east and south Asia."
In its assertion that the 2007 congressional immigration debate spurred illegal immigration, Kelley said CIS has provided no evidence and seems to have forgotten one of the first lessons learned in statistics: correlation does not imply causation.
Many pro-immigrant groups also said the CIS is underestimating the importance of market demand for labor.
"It's the economy, stupid . . . if you really want to reduce overall immigration, you need to reduced overall opportunity, which is what's happening right now," Rivlin said.
Caitlin Webber can be reached at cwebber@cq.com.
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