Report about dwindling illegal immigration sparks debate

A conservative think tank's announcement that illegal immigration to New York and other states is dropping dramatically has ignited a debate about the size of America's population of undocumented workers.The Center for Immigration Studies, which calls for tighter enforcement of immigration laws, estimated yesterday that illegal immigration plunged across the country by 11 percent in the past year. "This may be due to the economy, or it may be due to the fact that places like Long Island have become more enforcement-oriented," said Steven Camarota, the group's research director.Organizations that support immigrants' rights criticize the counting methods and deride the report as unscientific. "It's wishful thinking that as the economy gets worse, as we throw more money on the border and as the presidential candidates stop talking about it, somehow that'll solve illegal immigration," said Angela Kelley, director of the Immigration Policy Center in Washington, D.C.The controversial report, "Homeward Bound," puts the number of undocumented residents nationwide at 11.2 million, 1.3 million fewer than last summer. At that rate, that number would be halved in five years, the report adds.
The Center for Immigration Studies says those dramatic figures are based on counts of Hispanic men without high school diplomas, as tallied in the Current Population Survey, the rough data compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Such statistics are "imperfect measures," Camarota admitted."It's a pretty tenuous assumption, especially in New York State, where there are plenty of undocumented immigrants who are not Hispanic males that didn't finish high school," said David Kallick, a Senior Fellow at the Fiscal Policy Institute in Manhattan.While the Center for Immigration Studies defines itself as nonpartisan, some liberal groups say it is a thinly-veiled Republican group started 20 years ago as a spinoff of the conservative Federation for American Immigration Reform.The New York Immigration Coalition, which advocates for undocumented workers, said Long Islanders shouldn't cheer any loss of immigrants. "Local economies take a painful hit when immigrants leave," said spokesman Norman Eng. "Housing goes vacant, property values drop and businesses go under."
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