Center for American Progress: Study - "Self-Deportation" is a myth.

[pampango]

Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama recently took matters into their own hands by passing laws designed to criminalize virtually all activity engaged in by undocumented immigrants. This patchwork of state and local laws is driven by a strategy known by immigration restrictionists as “attrition through enforcement.” The goal is to create a climate of fear and make life so difficult for immigrants that they will self-deport.

So have state anti-immigration bills led to an exodus of unauthorized migrants from the United States as restrictionists have promised?

Immigrants’ reaction to anti-immigrant laws

Based on the experiences of immigrants in Oklahoma City, and in more recent cases such as Arizona after S.B. 1070, we find that:

1. Most unauthorized immigrants make the decision to stay in the country despite attempts to drive them out. The proliferation of state-level anti- immigrant laws has not changed the calculus for immigrants when it comes to choosing to stay here or return home.

2. At best, anti-immigrant laws simply drive immigrants from one area to another—say from one county to the next, or from one state to the next— rather than from the country. [i[At worst, they further isolate immigrants from the communities they live in and from local law enforcement, while driving families deeper into the shadows.

The reasons behind their decision to stay

So why aren’t immigrants leaving the country in response to these laws? There are several reasons.

Most undocumented immigrants have been in the country for 10 years or more, and the majority live in family units with children, meaning that they are well settled into American life, making it less likely that they would want to leave.

The costs of a return trip also are too steep for most people.

Finally, the stark lack of opportunities in the migrants’ home countries—which pushed them to enter the United States outside of legal status in the first place—have not gone away, leaving them with little reason to believe that life would be better there than in the United States.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2012/02/mexico_immigration.html

Of course most republicans already know that 'self-deportation' is a myth. Believing in the myth, however, conveniently "further isolates immigrants" and drives them "deeper into the shadows". The myth of 'self-deportation' is a conservative dream-come-true: the illegal immigrants stay here and become even more exploitable ("isolated" and "driven into the shadow&quot than they were before.