The problem in this day and age is the Border Officers are powerless in shooting gang members and drug dealers coming across. We should do what Ted Nugent wants to do. If someone comes across to do harm to American Citizens, we have every right to shoot them. We also, need to finish the Border fence and quit pussy footing around with it.
That would be pointless and wasteful. See Below:
Illegal immigration has completely grinded to a halt.
Growth of illegal immigration population grinds to a halt
By Mike Swift
Mercury News
Article Launched: 10/02/2008 06:30:19 PM PDTRelated
* On the Web:
* Pew study on unauthorized immigration
Since 1990, the nation's population of illegal immigrants has increased every year. But a new report by an influential think tank says that the growth of the undocumented population has stopped — at the same time a new federal estimate indicates that the growth of California's undocumented population has also come to a sudden halt.
The report released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, D.C., also found that the number of newly arriving illegal immigrants no longer outnumber the number of arriving legal immigrants, reversing a trend that lasted from 1998 through at least 2004.
Because illegal immigration is so hard to measure, the Pew study was unable to say whether the change is more the result of increasing numbers of people deciding to return to Mexico and other home countries, or fewer people deciding to immigrate illegally to the United States.
The study's authors do say, however, that the slowing economy, coupled with more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws and borders, are two possible reasons why the growth has stopped.
The Pew report is consistent with a new U.S. Department of Homeland Security report, as well as anecdotal evidence such as the reduced remittances workers are sending back to Mexico. The evidence suggests that the surge in illegal immigration in California and the rest of the nation during the 1990s and most of this decade has stopped.
"This was a population that had been
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growing rapidly and substantially for the past 15 years, and the growth has essentially come to a halt in 2008," said Jeffrey S. Passel, the Pew Hispanic Center's senior demographer and co-author of the report.
As of March, an estimated 11.9 million illegal immigrants lived in the United States, the report said. That means that undocumented immigrants still make up 4 percent of the U.S. population, and there are 40 percent more of them than in 2000.
But the Pew report said the size of the unauthorized population appeared to have declined slightly since 2007. That finding, however, is inconclusive because the estimates are based on statistical sampling with a significant margin of error.
"It's possible that the down economy can be either discouraging people from staying or discouraging them from coming in," said D'Vera Cohn, senior writer for the Pew Research Center and the report's co-author. "It's possible that enforcement issues are making people feel less secure.'"
A second Pew report released Thursday found that the economic slowdown is hitting both legal and illegal immigrants hard. Median household income for non-citizen immigrants was down 7.3 percent from 2006 to 2007. Among citizen households, median income was up 1.3 percent.
"The current economic slowdown, which one can trace to the end of the housing boom in late 2006, is taking a much greater toll on non-citizen immigrants" than on U.S. citizens, said Rakesh Kochhar, associate research director for the Pew Hispanic Center.
In California, the illegal population isn't growing either. The homeland security report estimated that California had 2.8 million illegal immigrants in January 2007, nearly the same population the agency estimated for January 2006. The federal report pegged the nation's illegal population at 11.8 million people in January 2007 — roughly consistent with the Pew estimates.
In the Bay Area, local immigrant rights groups say they haven't detected a drop in the number of undocumented immigrants. But other evidence suggests there could be a state or national drop. The Bank of Mexico reported this week that Mexicans living in the United States sent home 12 percent less money in August 2008 than they had the previous August. The $300 million drop was the largest percentage decline on record since the central bank began tracking remittances in the late 1990s.
And newly released 2007 Census information suggests the illegal population could be dropping in other parts of California. The foreign-born population — the Pew report estimated that 30 percent of the nation's foreign-born population is undocumented — declined in more than a dozen California counties from 2006 to 2007, although not in Santa Clara County.
The biggest drops were in San Diego and Imperial County, the two California counties that border Mexico.
And while California still has more illegal immigrants than any other state, its share of the nation's undocumented population is dropping — from 30 percent of the nation's total in 2000 to 24 percent in 2007 — as immigrants spread out across the country, according to the homeland security report.
The Pew report also found that:
# Four of five illegal immigrants are from Latin American countries, with about 59 percent from Mexico. Twelve percent are from Asia.
# About 40 percent of the nation's illegal immigrants — or 5.3 million people —have arrived since the decade began.
