My good friend Robert Stacy McCain noted this Juneteenth that Steven Camerota and Karen Ziegler of the Center for Immigration Studies analyzed reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and concluded that “the number of illegal immigrants has fallen by one million since the start of the year.” That number is far greater than the number of illegals that have been deported, and that means, if the estimates are close to correct, what President Trump called self-deportation has been occurring in far greater numbers than the most optimistic of us had hoped.

Let’s extrapolate a bit from this analysis. If the number of illegal immigrants decreased by one million in about five months, that’s an average decline of 200,000 every month — roughly 2.4 million per year. So if the current trend could be continued, by the time the 2028 election rolls around, the number of illegals in the United States will be less than it was when Joe Biden took office in 2021.

At this point, Mr McCain noted what this would do to congressional seat, and therefore electoral vote, apportionment. President Trump tried this, sort of, during his first term, when he wanted immigration status included in the 2020 census, as possibly a way to apportion congressional seats based on the number of American citizens rather than raw population, but that effort failed.

But I look at it differently. I have said it previously, that the United States needs immigrants, but that we need good, vetted, useful, legal immigrants, immigrants of good character, immigrants who have clean criminal records in their home countries, and immigrants who are civic minded, attend church, and will assimilate into our country, to wave American flags, not Mexican ones.

Those who have left voluntarily, without being picked up and kicked out, will have the advantage if they apply for legal immigration, not having a forced deportation on their records. We should be able to investigate their records in their home countries, and their records here in the United States, without prejudice, if they apply to return legally. And those who have poor records, we can exclude.

This is what we should want, people who will come to the United States, contribute to our economy and our society. We can assign reasonable criteria that they have to meet:

• Couples who have been legally married for more than three years;
• Couples who have children;
• No single males of military or fighting age;
• No gangland or gang-related tattoos;
• People with marketable skills;
• People who have a record of good employment;
• Families who attend Mass regularly; and, of course
• People with clean criminal records.

There was some Democratic politician, I cannot recall whom, who facetiously tried to justify illegal immigration by saying that the Latin American countries were sending us their best people. Actually, I saw it as people who weren’t good enough to make it in their own countries! But with the kinds of criteria I listed, and other criteria could be suggested, we could do our best to assure that the immigrants admitted actually are the best for whom we could hope.

The vast majority of Americans, including the majority of people who voted for President Trump, would gladly accept those kind of immigrants.