One of the talking points of the pro-amnesty crowd is that immigration is stabilizing or even declining, and thus is no longer an acute problem. Illegal immigration is down and Mexican immigration is supposedly net zero or even negative. Therefore the only remaining reason to persist in opposing “comprehensive immigration reform” is bigotry, nativism, blah, blah, blah.

Well, it turns out that immigration is surging. Newly released data from the Census Bureau shows that 1.5 million immigrants, legal and illegal, moved here in 2014, up 17 percent from the prior year, and up 38 percent from 2011. Data for the first six months of 2015 suggest last year’s total was even higher, at 1.6 million.

Between one-quarter and one-third of the 1.5 million new arrivals in 2014 were illegal aliens, meaning that a conservative estimate is that 1,000 illegal aliens a day are moving to the United States. Other research suggests more than half of these new illegals are overstaying temporary visas rather than infiltrating across the borders. A thousand new illegals a day is indeed a lower level that the spike a decade ago, but it can hardly be described as success – and, in any case, the number is climbing again.