A write-up with a current time stamp of Tuesday afternoon on how shocked (shocked, I tell you) legal Mexican immigrants and Mexican illegal aliens in the U.S. are that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) just won a plurality of the popular vote in "their homeland" by the the Associated Press's Julie Watson posited as a fact a statement so obviously false that you have to wonder if she has editors at all.
After finding an 18 year-old (as if a teenager would know) to claim that "I think most immigrants kind of fled Mexico because of the PRI" (it couldn't have had anything to do with better jobs with no responsibilities of citizenship in the U.S. -- no way), Watson presented the following statement as a cold, hard fact:
Illegal immigration has dramatically dropped since they left because of the crackdown at the U.S. border after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the slowing of the U.S. economy.
What rubbish.
There is a mountain of evidence out that Ms. Watson's claim is untrue. Here's just one: Procon.org's illegal immigrant and U.S. population chart covering 1969 to 2010 tells us that the population of "undocumented immigrants" in 2001 according to an annual report issued by the Pew Research Center was 7.8 million. But 2005, it increased to 11.5 million. That year, Bear Stearns, which did not speculate on previous numbers, estimated that the number was really 20 million. You don't get from 7.8 million to a number over 47% larger in four years with procreation, Julie.
And if anyone is aware of a "crackdown" at the U.S. border, please let me know. I "somehow" missed it.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
