February 18, 2021

Still Just 11 Million Immigrants?

As the old saw goes, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.

“Immigrant communities and their advocates are celebrating a change in tone at the White House and a new plan to resolve the legal status of the nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.” —ABC News, February 3, 2021

“A citizenship path for the roughly 11 million immigrants living illegally in the U.S., including those with Temporary Protected Status and people brought to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers, is included in a comprehensive immigration plan Biden announced on his first day in office.” —Bloomberg News, February 12, 2021

“The legislative text of the ‘U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021’ will reflect the immigration priorities that President Joe Biden unveiled on his first day in office. His proposal includes an earned pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented immigrants, expands the refugee resettlement program and deploys more technology to the Southern border.” —NBC News, February 15, 2021

“The White House on Tuesday reaffirmed that President Biden backs a controversial plan to create a pathway to citizenship to at least 11 million illegal immigrants — as the White House and congressional Democrats are expected to formally unveil a sweeping immigration bill as soon as this week.” —Fox News, February 16, 2021

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and a third time.” ―Thomas Jefferson (1785)

Perhaps the most successfully perpetrated lie of our modern era is the one contained in all of the above quotes from our hopelessly corrupt media, namely that there are 11 million illegals living in the United States. When this writer addressed the subject — five years ago — columnist William Campenni revealed the source of the orchestrated groupthink that endures to this day. “Call any journalist, pundit, anchor, strategist or lobbyist and ask: 1. How many illegal immigrants are in the United States? 2. What is your source for that number? Almost without exception he or she will answer: 1. 11 million. 2. The Pew Research Center,” he explained.

Pew gets its number from the Department of Homeland Security. In December 2003, that agency estimated between eight million and 12 million illegal aliens resided in the United States — and that 700,000 more enter each year and remain here. Nonetheless, a Pew Research column published in June 2019 stated that the number of illegals in the United States as of 2017 had declined to 10.5 million, constituting a “14% drop from the peak of 12.2 million in 2007.”

DHS isn’t the only agency tasked with estimating the number of illegals in the United States. The U.S. Census Bureau is also involved, and the way these entities do their calculations is laughable. “The Census and Pew use methodology that would embarrass an honest statistician,” Campenni reveals. “It goes like this: the number of illegal aliens equals the total number of immigrants and aliens minus the number of immigrants and legal aliens. But since we don’t know the number of total immigrants because it includes an unknown number of illegal aliens, we’ll make a guess. The fancy name for this process is called the ‘Residual Method of Estimation.’”

One of the reasons the number of illegals remains largely unknown is because an unknown percentage of illegals have refused to answer census-related surveys. And because the political climate is polarized, an informal bipartisan consensus that used to put the number of illegals avoiding participation between 25% and 30% has now bifurcated, with leftist groups asserting that figure has dropped to as low as 5%.

Yet the number of illegals in America is not just about those sneaking across the border. In 2017, the DHS admitted that 700,000 foreigners did so in 2016, even as the agency revealed its tracking is suspect. At the time, Inspector General John Roth stated that’s because it requires “pulling data from dozens of systems and databases, some of which are not integrated and do not electronically share information.”

One can be forgiven for wondering whether that is by accident — or design.

A 2020 research study led by Mohammad M. Fazel-Zarandi, a researcher at Yale and MIT, has even more ominous implications. It puts the number of illegals residing in the United States at somewhere between 16.5 million and 29.1 million.

What if it’s the higher estimate — or a number higher than that? Despite more than a decade’s worth of well-publicized border surges, Americans are supposed to believe just as many illegals have died, or repatriated themselves, as have snuck into the nation or overstayed their visas. They’re also supposed to ignore the current surge, one so large that Joe Biden’s administration has reinstated the Catch and Release program. That contemptible agenda is about turning illegals loose in America — during a life-threatening pandemic — without testing them for the coronavirus unless they have obvious symptoms.

President Biden apparently couldn’t care less. “I have determined that the declaration of a national emergency at our southern border was unwarranted,” he stated in a letter sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week. Immigration activists are also pushing Biden to repeal Title 42 health rules that give the CDC the power to order border agents to fast-track deportations of migrants. That commonsense policy is aimed at preventing them from spreading coronavirus to border agents, detention centers along the border, and among the rest of the U.S. population.

Former acting ICE Director Tom Homan, who estimates the number of illegals is approaching 4,000 crossings per day, warns that if Title 42 is rescinded, the number for border crossings “will be astronomical.”

He also believes it’s exactly what the Biden administration wants because of “all the promises Joe Biden has made and he continues to make.” Homan adds, “And you know, so this isn’t by accident. This is by design. This is an open-border strategy. He has bowed to the Left. We lose the border.”

For an entire Democrat Party and half a Republican one, open borders leading to the deconstruction of American institutions, traditions, culture, and language is a feature, not a bug. Thus, the “U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021” will move forward.

And what about the next amnesty after this one? Apparently it hasn’t occurred to many Americans — who have been conditioned to believe one is either “compassionate” (pro-amnesty) or “bigoted” (anti-amnesty) — that the amnesty granted to 2.7 million illegal aliens in 1986 was supposed to be a one-and-done deal. That blatantly broken promise incentivized at least four times that number of illegals to sneak into America or overstay their visas in expectation of a similar deal.

When they, too, are granted amnesty? The next deluge of border-busters and visa-overstayers seeking the next round of amnesty will be unprecedented.

Former President Ronald Reagan once stated that “a nation without borders is no nation at all.” For a Ruling Class completely beholden to the globalist agenda — and utterly indifferent to the needs of millions of their fellow Americans — that’s precisely the point.

All the numbers in the world notwithstanding.

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