Monday 2011-08-22

The US DHS has statistics on deportations going back over a hundred years. Since we don't have the number of illegal residents, it's difficult to normalize so we compare now vs a century ago.

However, spikes and other drastic changes are interesting. Was the post-World War 2 spike due to the Red Scare? And what was that mid-80's spike?

One normalization is to take the ratio of deportations to successful immigrations.

Which highlights the difficulties of the post-WW2 era and their sudden resolution in 1954.

If deportations keep falling, we'll be back to the deportation rates of the early 70's. Either our prosecution is getting lax, or we've deported them all.