Are the Undocumented Bullish on the Economy?

I’m not sure what this indicates, and I’m open to suggestions form all of you out there in NewsTacolandia. The fact is, as reported by the Washington Post, that the number of undocumented taxpayers in the US remained steady for two years, after a sharp drop. Not that the Washington Post is the end-all of the undocumented count in America, but they based their report on the Pew Hispanic Center, which has a pretty good reputation for such things.

This is how the Washington Post reported the numbers (I object to their use of the term “illegal,” but it’s a quote, so it’s their choice, not mine):

the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. last year was roughly 11.2 million, a number virtually unchanged from 2009. In that year, the level of illegal immigration declined for the first time in two decades, dropping 8 percent from 2007, as a sour economy and stepped-up border enforcement made it harder or less desirable for undocumented workers to enter from Mexico.

The report goes into more detail about labor statistics and such, but my question is basic. What does the plateau mean? Is this an indicator of an economic turn around? Wouldn’t it be interesting if Wall Street and the economy think-tankers looked to the undocumented worker as a leading indicator of fiscal health, along with housing starts and factory orders? It could be that the employment level at the very bottom of our economy is beginning to recover. We always look to the top of the employment food-chain for indications of how we’re doing, and most of the time those indicators mean nothing to the folks who work and spend and make the economy churn. Are the undocumented bullish on the economy, investing their security and lives on a fresh crop of new jobs, sticking around instead of leaving?

Immigration observers like to point to border enforcement and such as causes for the fluctuation in border crossing and undocumented counts. I think motivation trumps enforcement. It doesn’t matter how much you guard the border, if someone wants to get across, they will. It’s about the motive, and if there are jobs the motive is high. So a decline and a plateau, in a pure economic sense, would indicate a turn-around, no?

The problem with looking to the undocumented as a legitimate economic indicator is that society as a whole would have to acknowledge their part in maintaining a standard of living, and that would upset the comfort with which we look away. Imagine, if we legitimize the undocumented we’d have to pay them a decent wage and that would make our Caesar Salads unaffordable.