We've corrected that now, with help from our heroic anonymous datagraphing friend. See above and, for an interactive version, below.
This is a very striking result. There hasn't been a multi-month exodus on this scale since 2009. (The data series only goes back to 2008). And that was during and after the Great Recession. In contrast, the economy is now expanding.
And it's also a dramatic change from the last years of the Obama Regime. Then year-over-year increases were running far in excess of the estimated 1 million legal immigrants a year—causing Ed Rubenstein to warn repeatedly that an unreported illegal alien surge was underway.
Note that the immigrant workforce population includes legal immigrants and illegal aliens. And it's a net number. There have been reports that illegal crossings of the border in the Southwest are picking up, although still far below recent years. But any gross inflow is apparently still being swamped by the gross outflow.
Ed and I are not altogether clear why this Trump Effect is happening, since the GOP-controlled Congress had (typically) passed no legislation and Trump’s various executive actions continue to be frustrated by Leftist judges (although the Supreme Court has generally vindicated him). I have argued it's an example of what economists call “jawboning”—producing economic effects through informal pressure.
Ironically, it wasn’t even Trump’s jawbone, particularly. Especially early on, it was the Democrats and the Main Stream Media (to the extent that they can be distinguished). Their hysteria about Trump apparently convinced illegal aliens in the U.S. (and maybe some legal immigrants) that it was time to leave.
But let the record show that there is an informed view that administrative measures by Attorney General Jeff Sessions are already having an unsung impact. Even VDARE.com's notoriously grumpy blogger Federale has made an approving noise.
Of course, we are still cautious. The result could be statistical noise—we remain puzzled by April's sharp (but temporary) interruption of the post-election Trump trend. Or immigration could genuinely accelerate, perhaps encouraged by the Democrats' increasingly fanatical and indiscriminate commitment to it (Democrats are taking a hard line on immigration—from the Left, by Dara Lind, VOX, October 18, 2017).
But right now, the numbers say that Trump is quietly (!) achieving a significant triumph.
Peter Brimelow [Email him] is the editor of VDARE.com. His best-selling book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster, is now available in Kindle format. Follow Peter Brimelow on Twitter.
