Two Graphs Explain Why Voters Want More Deportations
The electorate understands what the administration can’t accept — the law is meaningless unless removable aliens go home
By Andrew R. Arthur on September 25, 2024
A recent Fox News poll revealed that 63 percent of registered voters support “deporting immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home countries”. They understand that, media claims notwithstanding, removals of aliens unlawfully here have declined under the Biden-Harris administration — and they’re not happy. Here’s proof, in some simple figures based on DHS’s own statistics, of that decline.
Key Metric. As I’ll explain below, one key metric reveals how effective U.S. immigration enforcement efforts have been: ICE deportations of aliens from within the United States (as opposed to at the border), also known as "interior removals".
Why focus on that metric? Because, by and large, border enforcement is reactive, driven by the efforts of foreign nationals to enter the United States illegally and by the incentives — better known as “pull factors” — drawing them here.
Consequently, removals of aliens apprehended at the border are a poor metric to gauge immigration enforcement. Immigration enforcement in the interior, on the other hand, is proactive — it represents the efforts of ICE under each administration to arrest and remove deportable aliens.
https://cis.org/Arthur/Two-Graphs-Explain-Why-Voters-Want-More-Deportations
