Half Of Immigrants In Texas Are Illegal

So says today’s report from the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, based on its deductions from census data. That should be no surprise to readers of the print edition of FrontBurner. In February, we reported:

No one knows exactly how many undocumented immigrants live among the 1.2 million residents of the City of Dallas, but the figure can be estimated. Approximately half of Dallas’ 516,000 Hispanics (43 percent of 1.2 million) are immigrants, or 258,000. Only 19 percent are naturalized citizens. According to the Dallas Federal Reserve, about 30 percent of U.S. immigrants are undocumented, which would indicate 77,400 of the immigrants in Dallas are undocumented. But the immigrant information clearinghouse DFW International says close to half of the foreign-born in Dallas are without documents [italics added]—which would make about 126,000. That’s about one person in 10 in the city. And the odds are at least six in 10 that he or she will be Mexican—10 percent of that country’s population is in the United States, as is 14 percent of its workforce, mostly sin papeles, without documentation.

Accepting the CIS numbers as fact, the question is, what to do about it? The need is for comprehensive reform of immigration policies, including some form of amnesty (yes, let’s use the forbidden word). But the government is paralyzed. Democrats fear offending the Hispanic vote; Republicans fear offending Lou Dobbs. So we can expect, as long as the Dallas economy is booming, for illegals to be drawn in greater numbers to fill the jobs our economy is producing. Where governments fail, the laws of economics take over.