Reverse Immigration Will Mean Fewer Hispanics in 2010 Census Than Leaders Expect

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

I've written a column and blog posts on what seems to me a decline in, and perhaps a reversal of, Latino immigration. Here's some more anecdotal evidence of this, an article on the growing number of vacant apartments on Tucson. The housing bubble was especially large in Arizona, and so has been the decline over the past several years in housing values. In addition, the state has passed some tough laws targeting employers of illegal immigrants. The Tucson Citizen article notes that vacancy rates aren't very high around the University of Arizona (where the market is presumably students) but reach 25 percent on the heavily Hispanic south and west sides of town. If this trend is real and continues, I think there will be a lot fewer Hispanics found in the 2010 census enumeration than 2000-07 demographic trends would lead Hispanic leaders and others to expect. They're going to charge that there has been a huge undercount and will press hard for the enumeration to be altered by statistical sampling.

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