As I write, it is just over an hour to Barack Obama's speech to the Democratic Convention in Denver. ImmigrationProf has these 'Immigration factoids about US presidents', culled from Wikipedia:

'Only one president was the son of two immigrant parents: Andrew Jackson. Five presidents ([Thomas] Jefferson, James Buchanan, Chester Arthur, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover) had just one immigrant parent each."   Of course, Barack Obama would be the sixth President with one immigrant (or at least noncitizen) parent.'

Meanwhile... 'energy, the economy and Iraq get top billing at the Democratic National Convention. Immigration won't get prime-time airplay – and that's fine with many advocates', writes Todd Gillman in the Dallas Morning News. As one delegate explains to him:

'"There's going to be a lot of meat cleavers that McCain can use on Obama," said Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., who represents 300 miles of border. "He can drag that bloody rag of immigration around if he wants to. But we're not going to hand him the rag."'

A search of the convention website suggests that immigration has been namechecked, but not in any high profile way. Patricia Madrid, Attorey General in New Mexico, made these comments in a speech on Monday:

'We pledge to enact comprehensive immigration reform in a way that unites this country and doesn’t divide it, reform that solves the problem rather than playing on our worst instincts and fears... Our immigration system is broken. We need comprehensive immigration reform, not just piecemeal local efforts, and that’s the change Barack Obama and Democratic leadership will provide. We believe we must change not just our policies, but our politics as well.'

Finally, ImmigrationProf alerts me to this substantial post on how immigration is featuring at the Convention by blogger Roberto Lovato.

Why do free-trade advocates so often draw the line at 'trading' labour? No self-resecting free market advocate would ever dream of promoting laws that interrupt trade across borders, but many endorse laws that obstruct the movement of people, argues Jason Riley of the conservative US paper, the Wall Street Journal.

'Too many conservatives today abandon their free market principles... principled conservatism gives way to a sort of reactionary populism. There is no inconsistency in advocating for free markets and open immigration', he says.

Riley has written a book on the topic, 'Let Them In: The Case For Open Borders', echoing Philippe Legrain's 'Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them' (see below on Legrain). There's footage of him addressing the Cato Institute here.

Anybody who has wondered what it must be like to be cooped up in the back of a truck trying to smuggle yourself into a European country should watch BBC Newsnight's two-part series, the Immigration Game, by journalist Sorious Samura.

Samura is renowned for his film of the war in Sierra Leone, and since then has specialised in a kind of immersion documentary in which he 'lives' with the subjects of his film. For his film 'Living with Refugees'... 'he set out to become, for all intents and purposes, a refugee. He traveled to Chad to live with a family in a refugee camp for one month. He lived under exactly the same conditions, eating what they ate, drinking what they drank. Sorious built close intimate relationships with the people in this situation sharing their hopes and fears. This film provides a unique insight into what life is really like for a refugee.'

'As the 2008 election nears, immigration will no doubt play a major role in deciding the winners and losers', writes Frank Sharry. Sharry, a regular visitor to Fomacs, has recently set up America's Voice, a 'communications campaign working to win common-sense immigration reform'. America's Voice has just launched immigration08.com, a project to track the impact of immigration as an issue in the November elections. Frank Sharry introduces it in a video here.

'It is our prediction that the issue [of immigration] will be used in elections at all levels like never before, especially by Republicans who believe the issue is an effective wedge that will make them look tough and Democrats look soft', writes Sharry. He continues:

'In 2005, 2006, and 2007 some Republicans tried it out, hoping that illegal immigration would turn out base voters angry about illegal immigration and win over culturally conservative swing voters in much the same way that crime, welfare, affirmative action, and gay marriage have in the past. Despite the fact that the issue just didn't seem to work in these three election cycles, many operatives and candidates believe that the storm of opposition to last year's comprehensive immigration bill presages a bigger reaction from voters this cycle.

Meanwhile, Democrats are beginning to understand that if you are for a common sense solution, and you lean into the issue, you can appeal both to swing voters and the growing Latino population, the largest immigrant voting population. Still, some Democrats are spooked by the issue and still not convinced.

Hence this project. Immigration08.com will track key races in which immigration may prove to be a critical, even decisive issue. We will evaluate quantitatively how this issue plays out in the Presidential, key Congressional, and close gubernatorial campaigns and on Election Day. We will track the ads being broadcast, the press coverage of immigration issues, and commentary on the elections. Key constituencies and voter blocs will be targeted with pre- and post-November 4th polling to get underneath what is happening and how immigration impacted close elections.

Our prediction? We believe we will learn, as we did in the last three cycles, that illegal immigration works well for Democrats who lean into it, rather than for Republicans who demagogue it. But the facts will be the facts, and the chips will fall where they fall.'

Amongst other material on the site is an analysis of the candidates' positions on immigration reform.

When Joanna Sieracka moved to Ireland two years ago, aged 16, she thought her budding theatre career was over.  ‘I was like, “I’m not that good in English, so I can’t act”. I didn’t know where to start’, she told Migration Matters.

Joanna Sieracka had been involved in theatre in her native Poland since an early age. ‘My mum was always dreaming of being an actress, but she became a teacher’, she says. ‘So she decided to make me an actress.’ Three years ago, her father, a carpenter, moved to Ireland, and a year later his family followed. Shortly after Joanna Sieracka arrived in Ireland, a friend had to pull out of a play, and she asked Joanna to audition in her place. She got the part, and suddenly, her acting career was back on track.

“I thought it would be harder. But it’s the same – you learn the speeches and you say them.”

Joanna Sieracka has managed to combine her acting with her Leaving Cert and a job in a sandwich bar. Now, she is preparing to take a lead role in the new production by Calypso Theatre Company, Fairtytaleheart by Philip Ridley. The play tells of two youngsters meeting in a community centre, and using fairytale to escape the troubling realities of their daily lives. Calypso have reset it in an Ireland, with an Irish boy from a ‘New Age’ travelling background meeting a Polish girl.

The play is directed by Bairbre Ni Chaoimh, who runs Calypso. She has been dealing with the subject of immigration in her theatrical work at least since her 2001 production, ‘Guess Who’s Coming for the Dinner’, which was Roddy Doyle’s version of the classic film: Doyle had a Nigerian asylum seeker as the dinner guest in a Dublin home. Shortly after that, Ni Chaoimh set up the Tower of Babel group to work with so-called 'separated children seeking asylum', young people who had come here alone, seeking refuge.

Tower of Babel aimed to provide them with leisure opportunities, using drama and music, and to help those with natural talent develop it. The group soon grew to include young people from all backgrounds and, as Bairbre Ni Chaoimh sees it, has followed the flow of their energies and ideas in the years since. There was an early emphasis on African drumming and singing, because that was where the members’ talents lay. Then there was a focus on circus skills and physical theatre, again following the interests of a fresh group of members. Currently, they are steeped in cinema: ‘Fairytaleheart’, which is just an hour long, will be followed by a selection of short films devised and made by Tower of Babel members.

‘Fairtaleheart’ runs at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin from next Monday, September 1, for a week. Tickets and information at (353 1) 881 9613.

Your correspondent has written a further article on it for the Irish Independent, forthcoming this Saturday: or check back here next Tuesday.

The Dublin Fringe Festival is about to take off, running from September 6 to 21. On first look at the programme, one thing jumps out at Migration Matters. Bisis Adigun's inventive Arambe Productions is back, with a play by the Trinidadian Nobel laureate, Derek Walcott, 'Pantomime'. According to the programme (available on the Fringefest website):
'In a guest house in Tobago, Harry, a retired English actor, devises a pantomime to attract customers. In this production, Crusoe is black and Man Friday is white. An exploration of the 'unfamiliar' through a 'familiar' text, addressing the continuing discourse of race, migration, interculturalism and identity in Ireland.'
We'll look into it some more, and hopefully bring further info to you presently. In the meantime, best of luck to Arambe.

See here for your correspondent's review of Camino de Orula's recent production of 'Sizwe Bansi is Dead' in the Sunday Tribune. We spoke to director Kunle Animashaun about his work in intercultural theatre previously - see below.

'The towering black gate opens silently to an alley with walls of corrugated metal. Scrawled in large white letters on one wall is: "The End."'

Journalist Julie Watson spent a week at the Mexican-US border gate in Tijuana, Mexico, watching people being deported.

'For those deported from the United States, the words are an unnecessary reminder', she writes. 'Nearly every hour of the day, guards unlock this gate that leads back into Mexico, clicking open the padlocks hung on each side, in each nation. Every time the gate slams shut, it wipes out a dream, divides a family, ends a life lived in the shadows of the law.'

She writes that U.S. deportations have jumped by more than 60 percent over the past five years.

'Many (of the deportees) stumbled over the Mexican official's question, "Where are you from?" after spending decades in the United States.'

'Among them are young people. There were more than 18,000 repatriations of children under 18 to Mexico this year, and in more than 10,000 cases they were alone, according to the Mexican government.'

This is strikingly vivid reporting. Here's one vivid detail from her lengthy piece (which she wrote for AP, and is published in the Washington Post):

"Where are you from?" the Mexican immigration official asks each one after calling off their names.

Paola Riveras' face is puffy and red from crying.

Three hours ago, the 16-year-old had jumped into the long line of Mexicans waiting to go to school, work or shop in California. When it was her turn to stop before the U.S. immigration agent, she panicked and kept walking.

He yelled "Stop!" three times. Finally, he stepped in front of her and told her to put her hands behind her head.

Riveras told him in Spanish that she had no visa and sobbed.

She says she only wanted to see her mom, who went illegally to Los Angeles when Riveras was 8 and left her with her father in Chimalhuacan, a slum outside Mexico City. When he died in December, her mother asked Riveras to come live with her. Now Riveras is not sure what she will do.

There will be no Migration Matters report on August 15, or during the following week, due to holidays. Thanks for reading!

Continuing our 'summer's reading' theme, poet Kate Clanchy has written a book based on her relationship with Antigona, a Kosovan refugee, who worked for her as a cleaner and nanny, 'What is She Doing Here: A Refugee' Story'. Reviewing it in the Sunday Times, Joan Smith concluded:

'Clanchy's book says something important about female refugees, who are often as much in flight from aspects of their old life as persecution. Male immigrants dominate the news, but there are many women like Antigona in western Europe, doing their best for their children and living in constant fear that their efforts won't be enough.

'In this instance, they weren't: the book ends with shocking finality when Antigona and her son are suddenly deported. Clanchy's distress is still palpable and the book is a tribute to their friendship. But it is also about the vulnerability of marginal women, for whom Antigona's fate is tragically emblematic.'

And Emine Saner interviewed Clancy for the Guardian: 'isn't there something exploitative about writing Antigona's story?' she asked.

'"I had to debate with myself whether it was a good thing to do," Clanchy says. "But I think she should be well known, I think she should be in a book. One of the things I can do is write. What is literature for? It must be about breaking down barriers, giving people a voice. Even though she's every bit as intelligent as me, she hasn't had everything that I have had that has turned me into a writer. So I can do that. I suppose the way it worked out was that I employed her, and I was able to employ her by writing a book about her." Clanchy says she will share royalties from the book with her subject.'

She concludes with the words of Antigona herself: 'There are a thousand women behind me in this country having shit lives. No one can understand their lives here. They are stuck, they cannot move forward. It takes one to break the ice.'

'Our instinct in response to oppression is to become hunched,' says Kunle Animashaun. "I want to encourage people to move from acceptance of their situation and feeling oppressed, to anger and defiance, to empowerment.'

Animashaun is doing this through work with his theatre company, Camino de Orula, which presents Athol Fugard's 'Sizwe Bansi is Dead' at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin (running until August 23).

The play is set in apartheid South Africa in 1972, and tells the story of a township photographic studio. (Here's a New York Times review of a production earlier this year.)

The studio's owner, Styles, is a charismatic romantic, who says of his simple studio, and its clients: "This is a strong-room of dreams. The dreamers? My people. The simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books, who never get statues erected to them, or monuments commemorating their great deeds. People who would be forgotten, and their dreams with them, if it wasn't for Styles."

As your correspondent wrote in an article for the Irish Independent, one of the areas in which its witness resonates most clearly is that of migration:

'For apartheid South Africa, read today's globalised economy: rich areas rely on poor areas to supply migrant labour, but only allow those migrants access under restricted and oppressive conditions, such as not being able to bring their families with them. Those who break the rules are liable to be deported.

'Fugard has one of his characters explain to the hapless Sizwe Bansi how he can get a permit to stay in the city. First, he must get a letter from a "white man" guaranteeing him a job. Then, he must take that to the Native Commissioner in his home area, and get a letter from that commissioner to the Native Commissioner in the city. Then, he brings all his letters to the senior officer at the Labour Bureau, who will put "the right stamp" in his pass book. And then he can apply for a residence permit ...'

(The image here is from Animashaun's production last year of 'The Wedlock of the Gods'.)

'Europe prides itself on being a continent of human rights, freedom and international solidarity. Yet it is fighting an increasingly dirty war against immigration, with casualties mounting every day', writes Philippe Legrain, author of 'Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them', in the Guardian.
'The biggest victims are the poor and the vulnerable, who are demonised as "illegal" or "bogus". But EU governments are also doing huge harm to the societies they purportedly want to protect.'
He continues:
'Those lucky enough to escape death en route to Europe now face being locked up when they arrive. The EU's new "return directive", which was recently approved by European interior ministers and MEPs, allows governments to imprison - sorry, detain - unauthorised migrants for up to 18 months. Why? For daring to cross a border in search of a better life.'
As well as a highly successful author and analyst, Legrain is an adept advocate in the popular media, as his appearance last year on RTE's comic show, 'The Panel', suggests. He also maintains a YouTube channel, to which you can subscribe for updates.
Legrain concludes:
'The cruel irony is that, despite all the suffering they cause, Europe's increasingly costly border controls fail to keep foreigners out. Instead, they foster people-smuggling and an ever-expanding shadow economy in which illegal migrants are vulnerable to exploitation, labour laws are broken and taxes go unpaid. They also encourage people who would rather work temporarily to remain permanently, because migrants fear that if they go home they will not be able to return to Europe. Surveys of Senegalese migrants in Italy show that most would prefer to spend part of their time working in Europe and part back home, just as the Poles who commute back and forth to Britain do. A sensible immigration policy would facilitate this.'

The worst examples of negative newspaper coverage of Polish immigrants in the UK linked Poles with words and phrases like "feckless", "chancers", "race riots", "swamp the NHS", "fears for schools", "cut-price treatment", "push British graduates to back of the jobs queue", "killers, drug smugglers and rapists", writes Wiktor Moszczynski of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain.

'We consider that this has made Poles living in the UK feel vulnerable and persecuted.... We maintain that Poles have felt humiliated by the coverage and are vulnerable to numerous acts of overt hostility and even violence which they have experienced from a vociferous minority of UK citizens.'

This article was published on the Daily Mail's website (and reprinted in the Guardian), following a complaint by the Federation to the Press Complaints Commission.

According to the Guardian, 'the federation complained about 50 Daily Mail headlines it said all displayed anti-Polish sentiment.

'However, the Daily Mail dismissed these claims. "If you take the balance of articles published by us the Polish migrant has not been identified as a hate figure and we have often and continuously drawn attention to the benefits Britain has and does derive from the skills that immigrants bring us," the Daily Mail spokesman said.

"We ran an in-depth series, The New Britons by Fiona Barton, which had a very balanced and fair assessment of the virtues of Polish immigrants," he added.

"The headline on a major feature by one of our top writers read: 'Poles apart – Hard-working, reliable, honest. Meet the Polish builders, plumbers, and decorators putting work-shy Britons to shame ...' ."'

A search of the Daily Mail website shows up one thing, at least: the newspaper is very interested in the Polish community. Some recent headlines include:

Novelist Chris Cleave is "a reflective, softly spoken thirtysomething who writes a fortnightly column about his children in The Guardian", writes Patrick Freyne in the Sunday Tribune, introducing his interview with Cleave. "His two novels (his second, The Other Hand, is out this week) are warm, witty and beautifully written stories about people caught up in the big issues of their times."

Interestingly for Migration Matters, Cleave's new novel, The Other Hand, tells the story of a Nigerian asylum seeker, Little Bee. Cleave explains some of the background:

"There's our world, of getting our cars fixed and worrying about deadlines, and then there's the terrible world where refugees come from," says Cleave. "I was trying to get a circumstance where those two worlds would meet, and there are places in the world where holiday-makers are incredibly close to warzones. And Nigeria is one of those places. I was looking for a microcosm in which the developed world meets chaos.

"Cleave's novel is based heavily on research and interviews", writes Freyne. "He has very strong views on immigration and that makes this a political work. It has very strong words about Britain's attitude towards countries like Nigeria (on the 'safe' list of countries from which the UK won't accept refugees, despite a brutal oil war), and also for British detention centres. Ireland will soon have refugee detention centres of its own, according to the Department of Justice. Maybe we should think twice?"

And strong words on detention centres from Cleave:

"Detention centres in England match the text-book definition of concentration camps," says Cleave, who's visited one. "They concentrate people who were originally dispersed for ease of working out what to do with them. It was the British who first set up concentration camps in South Africa during the Boer War. And that's what these facilities technically are.

"It's a big business. These places are run for profit by private companies. And asylum-seekers are in a sense a cash crop for these companies. Once you start doing this, then the profit motive for continuing to do it becomes huge. It's extremely expensive, and very cruel. And I think there are better ways of enforcing whatever immigration quotas a country decides to have.

"The Other Hand poses the question: what if this girl turned up on your doorstep and said: 'Can you help?' Once you develop a generic policy about what you're going to do with a group of asylum seekers, you end up treating them in a way that you wouldn't treat one asylum seeker. And that's where the denial is, because people allow the state to deal with it out of sight. It's not how we'd deal with it as individuals."

There's a short video introducing the book on Cleave's website. And the British Refugee Council has a list of other novels dealing with asylum and refugees.

One novel not mentioned on the Refugee Council site (above) is the excellent Dave Eggers novel on the Lost Boys of Sudan, What is the What (there's a collection of reviews here). Eggers collaborated with one of the Sudanese refugees in the US, Valentino Achak Deng, and wrote a fictionalised 'autobiography' based on Deng's story. (Deng's preface is here.) Deng now has a foundation doing charitable work in Sudan and with the Sudanese disapora in the US.
Eggers first made his name as a writer with the memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and founded a publishing house, McSweeney's, and a clutch of quirky associated media. One of his projects is Voice of Witness, an oral testimony publishing project, and the project's latest publication is Underground America: Narratives of Undocumented Lives. Whitney Joiner drove across the Mexican border with editor Peter Orner for Salon.com. Joiner writes of the book:
'The stories are heartbreaking and human. "My only crime was working hard," says "Diana," a 44-year-old Peruvian migrant working in post-Katrina New Orleans. Eventually caught by immigration officials who refused her access to a lawyer, she was detained in a prison, wearing shackles and chains, and allowed to shower only once a week. After struggling in poverty in Guatemala, 28-year-old "El Curita" came to the U.S. dreaming of a better life; he worked as a housepainter for an American woman who used his lack of legal papers to force him into domestic slavery.'

Integration "means that immigrants find a role in this society regardless of whether they adopt the culture of the United States; assimilation implies that, in fact, they do adopt U.S. culture", writes Mary Ann Zehr on Education Week. "What do you think?" she asks - and has ilicted some sensitive responses.

Staying with the books theme, ImmigrationProf points us towards Daniel Kanstroom's Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History. A review on Amazon says this 'legal and social history of deportation reveals the development of a second system within our immigration politics, one of exclusion and expulsion, in which few if any Constitutional protections exist.
'As Kanstroom’s introduction illustrates, in the system that exists today, a young man from Panama, who has lived in the US since the age of four and who pleaded guilty to a very minor crime of assault, can be put in solitary confinement, with no right to a bail hearing, and deported because of a retroactive change in the classification of deportable crimes.'
There is a thorough review here, which explains:
'According to Kanstroom, the current system is part of a decade-long “deportation experiment,” to which hundreds of thousands of immigrants and their families have been subjected and which tacitly serves as a means of exerting social control over foreigners. As Kanstroom points out, the fact that contemporary immigration laws have so utterly departed from Madisonian liberal ideals of due process is an unresolved and under-discussed contradiction within a state that prides itself as constituting “a nation of immigrants.”'

'Do you remember coming here?', Laura Potter asked 11 year old Abdul Kadir, from Somalia.

'I went to my auntie's house and I had to live there until my dad came', he answered. 'It took a long time... I don't remember anyone from my country except my dad and mum. I learnt English really quickly; it took less than a month.'

'What do you remember about Kenya?' Potter asked Abdul's sisters, about the refugee camp they had stayed in.

'All our family except my mum's mum lived with us, and outside it was all sand. The school started at 8 o'clock and the first thing they did was check your nails - if they were too long you got hit with a metal stick', said Ruwayda.

The Kadirs, from Somalia, were amongst the twelve children who recently arrived in the UK, interviewed in the Observer on Sunday.

The Border Wall is a new documentary from filmmaker Wayne Ewing about the attempt by the US Department of Homeland Security to erect 670 miles of walls along the 2000 mile southern border of the United States in the waning days of the Bush administration. Ewing has just posted a short preview of the film on his website. The film will play at the Denver Film Festival in November.

When Sonja Linden became writer in residence at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture in the UK, she was prepared to help their clients write out their stories of persecution, political imprisonment and torture. But, she says, "what I hadn't expected was an almost equal outpouring of shock at how they have been received in this country - their sense of isolation, insecurity and alienation. All had arrived with hopes of respite, all had stories to tell of their disillusionment and their encounter with what Amnesty have called in a recent report, ‘the culture of disbelief' that pervades the British Home Office". Linden formed a theatre company, iceandfire, to document the experiences of those she was working with.
She went on to help set up an outreach network in Britain, Actors for Human Rights, and they developed a play, Asylum Monologues. (You can view a short documentary on that here.) Next up, in October/November, is Welcome to Ramallah, a departure for her company, as it is set in the West Bank, not among asylum seekers and refugees in the UK.
Linden's work has been seen in Ireland: Calypso Theatre Company staged her play, I Have Before Me a Remarkable Document Given To Me by a Young Lady From Rwanda in 2005/06.
Linden recently wrote an insightful article on her work and motivation as part of the Migrant Voice on Refuge series (see below). 

Saskia Sassen writes that she has found "a direct connection between IMF and World Bank restructuring programmes in poor countries with the growth of trafficking of women and children for the sex industry of rich countries...
"In brief, it is far too simple to say that we have trafficking because we have traffickers. The IMF and the World Bank are also actors that have produced the growth of trafficking."
Sassen is a leading thinker on globalisation and migration. In this recent essay on the confrontation between powerful western states and "powerless immigrants", she points up some of the contradictions in policy. Such as:
"We have increasingly become dependent on immigration to meet the demand for low-wage jobs in our economies and to make up for our low fertility rates. Yet our policies aim at rejecting immigration - the source of needed money in many global south countries and the source of needed population growth in many global North countries."
Sassen's essay is part of a series, Migrant Voice on Refuge (see below).

The articles by Saskia Sassen and Sonja Linden cited above are both from a recent feature on the Open Democracy website, Migrant Voice on Refuge. This was a week-long series of articles and blog-debates on migration issues, with all contributions still available online - well worth checking out.
Amongst these is an article by Liza Schuster describing how "asylum has a pedigree stretching back 4,000 years...
"The word ‘asylum' comes from the Greek ‘asylos', that which may not be seized or violated. It referred to a place that was sacred or magical, such as a temple. Those who took sanctuary in such a place put themselves under the protection of the gods and so out of secular control. It allowed time for a wrong to be investigated and a judgment to be handed down. In this sense, temple asylum had a political role to play, until the state itself developed a monopoly of the role of protector."

With anecdotal reports of Poles and other Eastern Europeans returning home following the downturn in the economy, the BBC recently reported on a "labour crisis" in Scotland due to the same thing.
In response, Polish journalist Aleksandra Lojek-Magdziarz writes in the Guardian why she is planning to stay. On the subject of integration, she writes:
"Integration is painful and involves two parties. Both must learn from each other, as it is never enough to just be welcoming – it requires some proactive steps. Immigrants are best understood by others like them, and share similar patterns of experience. So we tend to stick together, a natural process, especially in the first three years of living in a new place. This mental and physical ghettoisation is the first, very natural step. Real problems begin if it lasts any longer than that."

The New York Times reports an 11% decline in the past year in the numbers of immigrants in the US illegally. This is based on a report by the Center for Immigration Studies. From the report summary:
"Monthly data collected by the Census Bureau through May 2008 shows a significant decline in the number of less-educated, young Hispanic immigrants in the country. The evidence indicates that the illegal immigrant population may have declined by over one million in the last year. There are strong indications immigration enforcement is responsible for at least part of the decline. The economy also is likely playing a role."
The Center describes itself as being driven by "a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted".
Its report, however, was not uncontroversial, and was rebutted forcefully by the Immigration Policy Center, which accused it of an absence of hard data, and faulty logic linking stepped-up enforecement measures with a decline in immigrant numbers. A summary of the debate is on the ImmigrationProf Blog.
Incidentally, worth bookmarking is the New York Times's page devoted to "Immigration and Refugees", where they collate all the paper's articles on those topics. The site features an interactive map of global migration, documenting where the world's 190 million migrants live (based on 2005 data).