It’s been a while since I heard the bellicose rantings of Tom Tancredo, but the Republican presidential candidates continue to bang the drum of illegal immigration. Alleged moderate Mitt Romney wants a nearly 2,000-mile-long fence along the entirety of the US-Mexico border. Michelle Bachmann wants a double fence. Herman Cain called for an electrified fence. They all want more resources, more personnel, and more technology to keep the legions of brown people from inundating our fair land.

Well, wait. Here’s The Economist, not noted as a fount of radical socialist leftist dogma, with a little article they call “Crying Wolf: The Republicans are Fretting About a Disappearing Problem.”  

At a “processing centre” in El Paso, …there is precious little processing going on. Of the 20-odd workstations, only two are manned. The Border Patrol agents sitting at them chat idly to themselves. Just two detainees, their paperwork complete, sit timidly in the corner of an enormous holding cell.  …Asked whether anything is going on, an agent replies, “it’s really quiet today.”

It’s quiet most days in the El Paso sector, as the Border Patrol dubs this 268-mile slice of the border. Back in 1993, agents arrested 285,781 people trying to enter America illegally. In 2010, however, agents picked up only 12,251 illegal immigrants in the area-a 96% decline. Much the same is true of the border as a whole: last year’s tally, of 447,731 arrests, is barely a quarter that of the peak year, 2000, when 1,643,679 people were intercepted. This year’s figure will be under 350,000; a fifth of the peak.

Aha, you may be saying, must be that damn Obama opening the border to his Mexican/Muslim/Kenyan brothers! Gotta get that guy out of the White House, and get us a leader, not a reader!

Sorry, no. “The drop in arrests reflects not laxer enforcement, but stronger,” says The Economist. There are five times as many Border Patrol agents on the Mexican border as there were in 1993. They are better equipped. Their numbers are augmented by reconnaissance drones and three different kinds of sensors. And there may not be a fence along the entire length of the border, but…

A third of the border is fenced, and most of the rest is in areas so remote or rugged as to make fences pointless or impractical. Some parts of the fence are 17 feet high, with metal plates extending ten feet below ground to prevent tunnelling.

All that effort, over two decades, by Administrations from both parties, has paid off. There is no border crisis. One Border Patrol agent told the magazine that they would never be able to catch every suspect — but they are not very far off.

How about that. An issue that makes Republicans foam at the mouth is really not an issue at all. (Kinda like Iraqi WMD’s, no?) The border is about as secure as it can possibly be. And, as The Economist notes, that notorious softy Obama continues to pump more resources into border protection, even as he accedes to spending cuts in many other areas.

Funny. Why do I have to read about this in a British publication? Why don’t the American media point out — at least once in a while — that the Republicans’ immigrant-bashing and fearmongering has no basis whatsoever in reality?