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Notes -
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Which numbers, specifically, are you thinking of?
Generally when I hear this argument, it refers to articles like this one, which presents arguments like the prominant graphic one that the 'undocumented' migrant population has remained relatively constant in the US since 2008 (~12 million.)
However, they tend to bury the categorization schemes like this-
However, one of these categories is notably not like the others. 'Adjust to legal status' is a legal category shift, not a departure (or death) of the person.
If you provide a temporary legal status to a million illegal immigrants, your country's population has still increased by a million people, even if you offset that number by a million legal-category grants. This is a false equivalence of categories that avoids dealing with the implications and insinuations of absorbing a million peoples who arrived illegally, mostly by handwaving the numbers away as no longer counting.
Further, even the 'removed by DHS' category is subject to statistical chicanery. Or as a former president once admitted, "a little deceptive."
During the Obama administration, for example, the Obama administration's deportation statistics conflated different actions that made the number of deportations appear high even as the expulsion of people who settled and worked in the US decreased. That sort of mismatched occurred because at- or immediately-within border returns were publicly equated to deportations. Moreover, the Obama administration counted removals that previous administrations wouldn't have. This was a recategorization that let Obama claim a hard-on-illegal-immigration reputation even as the expulsion of people who settled and worked in the US- i.e. deportation of people who got past the border crossing phase- dropped by 40%. This practice resumed with the Biden administration
So when the (often pro-migration) studies make claims that the migrant population is generally steady, it's always important to see how they address the issue of re-categorization of migrants (redefining illegal arrivals as legal residents no longer tracked) and the conflation of deportation types.
If you were to go to a home depot parking lot at 7 am and talk to the workers there, what do you think the median time the undocumented subset of workers have been in the country would be? I predict 8 ± 3 years.
Do you predict otherwise? If not, that means that most illegal residents of the US are not recent arrivals.
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