ANALYSIS/OPINION:

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Well, that’s one way to stem the tide of illegal aliens streaming across the border from Mexico.

Jack up unemployment rates to near double digits, dunk America into a double-dip recession and put us so deeply into hock with the Chinese communists that it will take generations for us to recover.

After long enough, living and working and trying to eke out bare survival in America becomes even worse than trying to get by in Mexico.

A new study from the highly esteemed Pew Hispanic Center says the millions of Mexicans who risked their lives crossing the desert to get here to the promised land for a better life have given up on the U.S.

This is no small feat. Have you ever been to Mexico? Not the ritzy beach towns with the gated resorts, but Nuevo Laredo? The dusty streets are filled with bony children selling gum and candy for just a few spare pennies.

Desperate as that little trade may have once seemed to us, at least it has the vibe of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange during the ‘90s. Nothing like that is going on anywhere on this side of the border.

Remember the axiom of big government bureaucrats: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. When, finally, under the crushing weight of taxes and regulation, it stops moving, subsidize it.

So the Mexicans have quit coming to the hopeless part of North America. Canada is just too far to walk.

Or, at least, the few final stragglers who have not kept up with America’s woes and are still sneaking into the U.S. are balanced out by all the illegal Mexicans already here who are now risking their lives to cross the desert to escape the American “dream.”

Now we know why all the politicians in Washington have finally agreed to beef up security and build a fence along the southern border. They’re desperate to keep all the Mexicans from leaving.

That’s right, who would raise their children and mow their lawns and do all of America’s dirty work if all the Mexicans left?

Authors of the Pew report call the stunning shift in migration patterns historic. Not since the Great Depression, they say, has a shift of this magnitude occurred along the U.S.-Mexico border. Not since the Great Depression?

It’s almost enough to make you pine for the good old days of rampant illegal immigration.

• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com.

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