If the figures are to be believed, net immigration from Mexico has ground to a halt, according to a recent report by the Pew Hispanic Center.
    In layman’s terms, that means that one for one, those leaving balance Mexicans entering the United States. It’s a reversal of an ongoing trend over the past four decades that has seen unauthorized immigration peak at 12 million individuals in 2007, dropping to 11.1 million in 2009, then holding virtually flat at 11.2 million in 2010, citing the most recent statistics available. The center attributes the stagnation to a multitude of factors, including rising deportations, greater enforcement at the border, growing dangers associated with border crossings, the weakened U.S. job market and a long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates.
    A typical talking point in the debate over immigration, legal and otherwise, is the plight of American agriculture, with crops supposedly doomed to rot in the fields as the illegal workforce self-deports. The argument holds that “Lazy Americans” simply won’t do the work, and I agree, but not for the reasons you might expect. Americans expect a fair wage for a day’s work, and that remains unlikely while an abundant source of cheap labor streams into the fields.
    A far bigger problem, and the one we should focus on, is the outsourcing of jobs that American workers would still like to do, have done for generations, and earned good money doing. Manufacturing, customer service and technology jobs dwindle as corporate strategists realign workforces around the globe, dropping domestic production as labor prices rise to the living wage level. India, long a bane to labor unions and the information technology sector in the United States and Europe, now suffers the same fate, watching once-lucrative contracts dissolve and leave their shores for ever-cheaper labor deep in the Asian third world. Manufacturing is now synonymous with China, accounting for 33 percent of their gross domestic product, compared to 14 percent here at home.
    What does it all mean? Quite simply, we have seen the enemy, and he is us. In the quest for ever-cheaper goods and services, we afforded Wall Street the opportunity to wholesale our employment infrastructure overseas. These days, the real invaders are far more likely to wear suits than serapes, plundering our shores for jobs while we debate fencing Texas and Arizona.
    Maybe we can hire the Chinese to build it.