NYT: Immigration Enforcement is Working Really Well, Boo Hoo Hoo

Tell me again why these people need automatic health care:

Like hundreds of thousands of middle-class Brazilians who moved to the United States over the last two decades, Jose Osvandir Borges and his wife, Elisabeth, came on tourist visas and stayed as illegal immigrants, putting down roots in ways they never expected.

After packing up their plasma-screen TV, scholastic trophies and other fruits of 12 prosperous years in the Ironbound in Newark, the couple and their American-born daughter, Marianna, 10, were scheduled to fly back to Brazil for good this morning. They expect their son, Thiago, 21, to follow in a year or two, despite his reluctance to leave the only land that feels like home.

Wow, they sound even worse off than the Graeme Frost family.

Why are they leaving? Glad you asked:

For years, advocates of giving people like the Borgeses a chance to earn legal status have argued that illegal immigrants will only be driven further underground by enforcement measures like raids or denying them driver’s licenses. Advocates of harsher restrictions and penalties have argued that illegal immigration is now growing independently of the ebb and flow of the American economy. Returning Brazilians defy both contentions.

So yes, enforcement and such, but what was the real tipping point?

Then in June came their personal tipping point: the collapse of the bipartisan bill in Congress that would have offered them, and millions of other illegal residents, a path to legal status.

“After the law didn’t pass, it was like all the hope went away at once,” said Mr. Borges, who had traveled, with other members of St. James Catholic Church in Newark, to rallies supporting the bill in Trenton and Washington.

Shamnesty's defeat broke their hearts! Read the rest of the article and listen for the slow, scratchy drone of a sad violin as they describe how these Brazilian illegal immigrants brought "bustle" to communities and made them "vibrant". Okay, it doesn't say "vibrant" this time, but I would not be surprised to learn that a NYT copy editor saw that in an early draft and wondered whether "vibrant immigrant communities" was becoming cliche.

"Bustle". That's the word we need. White folks can't bustle (nor are they vibrant). But go to carnival down in Rio sometime and you'll see a whole bunch of bustling going on.

Keep an eye out. I bet we see more bustling as this issue is debated.