A USA Today article has reported that fewer Mexicans, both the legal and illegal kinds, are coming to America. The flow has dropped by as much as 50% since 2006, the article claims. So the big question here would be – why?

The article offers two possibilities.

It's the economy, stupid.

"People in Mexico are very aware that there's an economic crisis in the U.S. and that there are far fewer jobs," says a U Cal-San Diego Immigration expert.

Fewer jobs? This would seem to put the lie to the claim that Mexicans jump the black border line drawn on the map just so they can latch onto the big government udder and suck up billions of our give-away dollars through the teats of Medicaid, AFDC, Food Stamps, SSI, WIC, public housing, taxpayer funded schools and so on down through the welfare list.

So this tells us the reason immigrants come to America is the same reason immigrants have always come to America – jobs.

When the jobs dry up the flow of immigrants drys up.

Better border bouncers

The US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has swollen its ranks to 19,000 illegal newcomer catchers, up from 9,800 since 2002.

However, their own stats show that they're actually catching fewer illegals than before. They claim this reflects the fact that fewer people are trying to immigrate illegally.

"Our smart enforcement is deterring people from coming in," crows CBP spokescrat Steven Cribby in the USA Today article.

But why doesn't fewer people being caught simply reflect fewer people being caught? If they were catching more people wouldn't they claim that reflected their smarter enforcement? Either way they spin it, it's win-win for folks who wear government garb and who are themselves sucking on the milk bag of ever-increasing federal tax dollars for ever increasing numbers of agents, gear and vehicles.

The aforementioned USA Today article, however, doesn't even discuss other possible reasons for the decrease in Mexican gate-jumpers.

The Wall

Advocates of walling off America from Mexico would like to claim that the Great Inland Barrier Reef is working. But as reported in Mexican border wall or speed bump? even before the structure is completed inventive people have been finding ways over, under, around and through it, making it more of a sport than a spoiler.

The Drug War

The deadly ongoing drug war along the border just might be keeping would-be border busters away. While many Mexicans and other Latinos who make their way north from Central and South America might be willing to take their chances with coyotes leaving them stranded in boxcars and trailers to die in the suffocating heat, what's the point if they're just going to get gunned down in the crossfire between cops and military and cartels before they even reach the border?

The Drug War again.

Forget about jobs in the US. As long as Americans are eager to suck on the bountiful mammilla of illicit drugs eagerly supplied by the Mexican cartels why not just get a job with the Mexican cartels and help produce and package and ship the contraband across the border?

Nowhere left to go

Aryans and other anti-immigrants contend that there are way too many illegals in the country already.

Again from the article, "About 11.5 million people born in Mexico call the USA home. They account for one-third of all foreign-born residents and two-thirds of foreign-born Hispanics."

So America is almost at the point where all minorities combined outnumber all Caucasians combined, making white people a minority "in their own country." That means, to their way of thinking, America is already on its way to becoming a Third World country and, by golly, nobody wants to sneak into a Third World country.

If there's a libertarian message in any of this it would be that, in spite of drug wars and border wars and aggressive illegal worker roundups, immigration is still determined by, guess what, market forces.

They come for the work, not for the welfare, and they stay home when the work isn't there.