Changing Behavior

A new report from the Inter-American Development Bank offers yet more evidence that enforcement is starting to lead illegal aliens to rethink their options. The punchline of the report -- a survey of 5,000 immigrant adults from Latin America (except Cuba), almost half of them illegal aliens -- was that Hispanic immigrants are sending less money home. But some other findings are more interesting -- 28 percent of respondents said they were considering returning home and 81 percent said it was harder to find a job. Those numbers, and the drop in remittances, could just be the economy, of course, except that the survey also asked whether they considered 'discrimination against immigrants' a major problem, and two-thirds said yes. Since that was almost double the proportion who answered yes in a survey in 2001, it's pretty clear that the 'discrimination' they're talking about is simply enforcement of the immigration laws, a point reinforced by the fact that illegals were much more likely to point to this 'discrimination' than naturalized citizens. Attrition is beginning to work. Faster, please.