OPINION: Joe Biden wants amnesty, but US tally of illegal immigrants is deeply flawed – By Lionel Shriver (New York Post) / July 19 2021
Having indulged an unhealthy interest in human migration for decades, I’ve been intrigued by how the number of illegal immigrants that journalists cite as living in the United States never changes.
For years on end, I’ve read that the population of America’s “undocumented” — a euphemism that seems to upbraid the receiving country’s bureaucrats for failing to issue its woefully overlooked residents the proper papers — is 11 million. With the artificial precision that often attends these unverifiable figures, which derive their authority from sheer repetition, some journalists will quote the number as 11.3 million.
Oh, there was a brief period about 15 years ago when that standard statistic rose to 13 million, but then it popped right back down to 11 again, without any headlines about a stampede of 2 million suddenly ploughing over the Mexican border in the southern direction.
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.”
