Immigration activists and Hispanic groups are demanding that President Obama deliver on his promised comprehensive package of immigration reform.

Already, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) has derided federal sweeps of illegal aliens as “un-American.” And recently the Obama administration stripped the federal authority of Arizona’s controversial Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, to make immigration arrests.

Yet expect the public to oppose any so-called comprehensive immigration reform even more vehemently than it did George W. Bush’s doomed 2007 proposals.

Why?

Conditions on the ground have changed drastically in the last two years.

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First, the nation’s unemployment rate is now over 9 percent. It may peak beyond 10 percent. In many western states, such as California, the jobless rate may climb even higher.

The old notion that “illegal immigrants pick the lettuce that Americans refuse to” is an ossified stereotype. In fact, today fewer than one out of 20 illegal aliens currently do farm labor. Most are engaged in construction or working in the service industry, or are homemakers with childcare responsibilities. While plenty of unemployed American citizens still may not yet wish to pick oranges, the jobless might consider taking jobs like hammering nails or working in restaurants.

Second, many states are broke. Taxes are rising. The public is questioning all sorts of government entitlement expenditures. In California, the latest budget crisis saw a $26 billion shortfall — at a time when some studies put the state’s net health, housing, education, and criminal justice costs for some 3 million illegal aliens at more than $10 billion a year.

Yet illegal aliens who receive government help somehow can send money back home to Mexico.

Of the 11–12 million illegal aliens believed to be residing in the United States, well over half are thought to be Mexican nationals. Each alien on average may send back perhaps about $3,000–$4,000 per year to Mexico — making their total of $25 billion in remittances a major source of Mexico’s national income. So the money sent south may approximate much of the cost of providing support for the nation’s resident illegal population in the first place.

Americans have never minded helping the poor in their midst, even during hard times. But it’s fair for us to wonder whether our own rising taxes go in part to pay for those who are subsidizing the Mexican government’s inability or unwillingness to provide basic care for its own citizens.

Finally, Mexico has seen the worst spate of drug violence in its recent history — threatening to reduce the government to the status of a narco-state like Colombia in the 1980s. More than 7,000 Mexican citizens have been killed in gun battles between government security forces and the drug cartels this year. Who wants that violence to keep spilling over into major U.S. cities like Phoenix and Los Angeles?