CIS has just released a paper on the link between legal and illegal immigration, how one enables the other. I. E. a legal Hispanic community provides an infrastructure for illegals to move into; a large enough group of illegals will produce an amnesty. The amnestied will send for their families, which will make for a larger legal Hispanic community; this will provide an infrastructure….you see the problem.[Two Sides of the Same Coin |The Connection Between Legal and Illegal Immigration, February 2006]

The paper, by James R. Edwards, includes the tall, skinny, chart, below, which displays in graphic form the preponderance of Mexicans in the latest immigration wave.

The press is ever hopeful that the rare and highly prized creature, the Moderate Muslim, actually exists. Danish resident Omar Marzouk recently outed himself as such, and that was news. The Egyptian-born comedian had regarded last year’s London bombings (in which 56 people died) and terrorism generally as fine material for his stand-up routine, but came to see the Cartoon Jihad as unfunny

But when Muslim mobs began torching embassies last month, protesting a Danish newspaper’s cartoons about Islam’s prophet Muhammad, Marzouk, 32, stopped laughing. He decided, he said, it was “time to stand up.”

“Some of my friends say ‘why should we? Do people in the West really think that we are all terrorists?’ But myself, I can’t just sit there and watch anymore.” [European Muslims rise up in defense of democratic values, By James Brandon, San Francisco Chronicle, March 8, 2006].

Good for Omar. The problem is that Islamic programming is profoundly effective, and even extensive exposure to western values does not eradicate fundie Muslim thought.

Indeed the self-styled moderates and progressives may have a steep hill to climb. According to a Sunday Telegraph poll taken in Britain last month, 40 percent of Muslims surveyed said they favored the application of Shariah law in heavily Muslim-populated areas of the country. Although 99 percent condemned the July bombings, one-fifth of those surveyed said they sympathized with the feelings and motives of the bombers.

Here in the U.S., we have learned that the Tarheel Jihadist, Mohammed Reza Taheriazar, “spent most of his life in the United States” where he received a college degree. But when he thought that fellow Muslims were being mistreated, he sought to “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world” by murdering Americans. Fortunately, his SUV rampage on the UNC campus resulted in no deaths, although several were injured.

There is an American arrogance that we do assimilation better than Europe. That idea may be true up to a point, but the real question is whether the hardened ideology of Islam is simply too antithetical to western values to permit genuine acculturation. So the Moderate Muslim is a rara avis even here, and is subject to becoming extinct everywhere due to determined hunting.

Is there a post-Housing Bubble illegal immigrant crime wave coming? The Financial Times reports:

US illegal migrants up almost 500,000 a year
By Edward Alden in Washington

The number of illegal immigrants in the US has continued to grow by nearly half a million each year in spite of US efforts to increase security at the country’s borders, according to a survey released on Tuesday.

The study, by the Pew Hispanic Center, said that the population of unauthorised migrants reached between 11.5m and 12m last year, accounting for nearly a third of the foreign-born population in the US. That number is up from roughly 8.4m in 2000…

In reality, that number could be even higher. The Pew Hispanic Center has a liberal bias (although it is admirably more honest than most institutions on immigration issues).

The Pew survey underscored the substantial presence of illegal workers in the US labour market. It estimated about 4.9 per cent of the US labour force, or 7.2m workers, was composed of unauthorised migrants.

So, about 40% of “undocumented workers” aren’t workers. Interesting. And that’s not counting “the 3.1 million children who are U.S. citizens by birth living in families in which the head of the family or a spouse was unauthorized,” who get turned into automatic American citizens by the current (but dubious) interpretation of the 14th Amendment.

Nearly a third of those work in service occupations, 19 per cent in construction and 15 per cent in production, installation and repair jobs.

Since only 49% of illegal immigrants are adult males, according to Pew, that would suggest that three-eighths of male illegal immigrant workers are in construction, which is perhaps the most boom-and-bust sensitive sector of the economy. In this decade, very low interest rates and very high home housing prices have driven a construction boom.

But what happens when the Housing Bubble inevitably deflates?

A reader writes:

“Here’s something to contemplate – something I have not seen mentioned. It is perhaps not widely appreciated that when a recession hits the residential construction industry, the layoffs are not just 10 or 20% of the labor force, but more like 80%. … What will the laid off illegal immigrants do? Go home? Probably not. They will not be able to get jobs in the U.S. There is really only one option: crime.”

I’m not sure. The linkage between periods of unemployment and high crime rates is uncertain. But I’m definitely not reassured.