Wellity, wellity, wellity. Everybody laughed at ol' Mitt Romney when he said that the answer to illegal immigration was to make life so miserable for undocumented immigrants that they hightailed it back to Mexico.

Well, that's happening. Pew Hispanic Center reports the first net decrease in migration from Mexico in 40 years:

In the five-year period from 2005 to 2010, about 1.4 million Mexicans immigrated to the United States and about 1.4 million Mexican immigrants and their U.S.-born children moved from the United States to Mexico.

In the five-year period a decade earlier (1995 to 2000), about 3 million Mexicans had immigrated to the U.S. and fewer than 700,000 Mexicans and their U.S. born-children had moved from the U.S. to Mexico.

This sharp downward trend in net migration has led to the first significant decrease in at least two decades in the number of unauthorized Mexican immigrants living in the U.S.—to 6.1 million in 2011, down from a peak of nearly 7 million in 2007. Over the same period the number of authorized Mexican immigrants rose modestly, from 5.6 million in 2007 to 5.8 million in 2011.

(The American Spectator actually tries to give credit to Romney for being prescient, though I don't making America's economy so crappy that even immigrants don't want it is exactly what he had in mind.)

While the report does not specify how many of those returning to Mexico came to the States illegally, circumstantial numbers indicate a significant portion of them were in fact undocumented, and a good number of those were deported. Obama has stepped up deportations, to the consternation of his Hispanic supporters, possibly as an overture to a more comprehensive and bipartisan immigration reform strategy.

Josh Kraushaar at the National Journal plays this trend out as undercutting Democratic demographics. 

It's not a given that Hispanic voters will make a larger share of the electorate than in 2008, as many in the Obama campaign had presumed (and depended upon). Already Democrats are facing challenges registering Hispanic voters in battleground states, like Arizona.

The Dems have been counting on the exploding Hispanic vote to help bolster their future electoral hopes, but Kraushaar notes that as Mexican immigrants assimilate, they tend to become more conservative, and without new immigrants replacing them, the demographic will shift to the right. Kraushaar also thinks the trend will blunt illegal immigration as a hardline issue for Republicans. I don't buy this part—Republican views on immigration have never tracked closely to reality, and have always seemed more based on economic scapegoating than anything—but it will give more cover to politicians like Marco Rubio to massage the issue.

Still, all this gives Obama plenty of ammo for the upcoming election. If his deportation policy is working, he can appear tough on the criminal aspect of illegal immigration and, by supporting the DREAM ACT, soft on the human side of it. It also defangs the arguments of officials like Jan Brewer, who claim they must pass harsh laws like SB 1070 because the government has not done its part in enforcing federal immigration laws and securing the border. But arrests along the border have dropped due to advances in border security and declining rates of immigration, not federal indolence. How is SB 1070 a response to an epidemic if immigration rates are reversing?

Speaking of which, the American Spectator also tips its hat to border patrol for doing a bang-up job. Quoting Pew:

Apprehensions of Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally have plummeted by more than 70% in recent years, from more than 1 million in 2005 to 286,000 in 2011—a likely indication that fewer unauthorized immigrants are trying to cross. This decline has occurred at a time when funding in the U.S. for border enforcement—including more agents and more fencing—has risen sharply.

I get what they're saying here, but replace "border patrol" with "EPA" and "apprehensions of Mexicans" with "regulatory activity" in that sentence and see how happy they are that a government organization is doing less work for more taxpayer money.

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