Muslim asylum seekers already being deported

Hat tip to Oidin

Mexican border as secure as it is going to get

Apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants at the U.S.-Mexican border, which is the only way we have to measure illegal immigration, are at the lowest level in more than 40 years, according to the Washington Spectator.  Deportations of unauthorized residents meanwhile are at their highest level in more than a century.

I don’t say that this is a solution to the unauthorized immigration problem in the United States.  I do say this is as close as we’re going to come to solving the problem through enforcement alone.

Click on The Border Hasn’t Been This Secure in 40 Years for the full article in the Washington Spectator.

Click on The Wrong Kind of Immigration Spending for a report and charts from The American Prospect

Click on Immigration Enforcement In the United States for a PDF of the Migration Policy Institute’s report.

Click on Migration Policy Institute Topics for a menu of recent news items about the Institute from USA Today.

Obama deports more migrants than Bush

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The federal government deported more illegal immigrants in fiscal 2010 (which ended Sept. 30) than in any previous year.  Nearly 400,000 illegal immigrants were deported.  While that is a lot, it is estimated that there are more than 10 million people residing in the United States who entered without proper documentation.  At the present rate, it would take 25 years to deport them all – assuming they weren’t replaced by additional illegal immigrants.

The Obama administration has continued to step up enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border, and has expanded the Bush administration’s Secure Communities policy, which helps local law enforcement officials identify illegal aliens among people arrested on criminal charges.

The big bottleneck in immigration enforcement is the same under the Obama administration as under the Bush administration – failure to appoint sufficient numbers of immigration judges to process the cases.  Immigration judges are officials of the U.S. Department of Justice, not part of the federal court system.

Surveys by the Pew Hispanic Center indicate that illegal immigration fell nearly two-thirds in the past five years, but this probably is due more to the bad U.S. job market than enforcement.

What all this shows is that, for good or ill, the Obama administration’s policy on immigration is a continuation of the Bush administration’s policy.