Yesterday The New York Post posted an article about the push to grant all illegal aliens living in America for a certain period of time American citizenship. There seems to be some question as to how many people would be included if a law to do that were passed.

The article reports:

But how do our well-informed correspondents know how many immigrants live illegally in the US? That 11.3 million figure originates from the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.” 

But these are the very residents notoriously averse to responding to census inquiries, regardless of assurances that being counted won’t lead to an unwelcome knock on the door from the cold-hearted immigration heavies at ICE. “Irregular” migrants have a vested interest in remaining invisible. Should you ask a crowd of such people, “Who’s not supposed to be here?” funnily enough nobody’s likely to raise a hand. 

A TRIO of academics affiliated with MIT and Yale University set about trying to reproduce that oft-quoted statistic by other means. Their results were published in 2018. Employing a range of operational stats (such as deportations and visa overstays) and other demographic data (such as death rates and immigration rates) from 1990 to 2016, they first fed their computer model the most conservative assumptions possible. 

As the study’s authors anticipated arriving at a number well below that eternally unchanging 11.3 million, confirmation bias alone would have helped produce a lowball estimate. Instead, even with all the inputs rigged at improbably low levels, the model still generated a population of illegal immigrants in the US of 16.7 million — 50 percent higher. 

There is a reason a country tries to control the rate of immigration. In order to prosper, a country needs immigration combined with assimilation. The idea is to bring people to your country who want to be part of your country–not to change it to the country they left. If the country they left was so good, why did they leave? Granting blanket amnesty to people who are here illegally is risky–it risks creating an electorate that can easily be swayed and does not understand America or its form of government. Legal immigrants have to study the Constitution. Many times legal immigrants know more about American history than those of us who have grown up here. Immigration needs to be controlled. Otherwise it is a threat to national sovereignty, regardless of the country involved.