More than ten percent of the illegal immigrants in the U.S. have left in the past year, voluntarily and otherwise, so reports the Center for Immigration Studies. That adds up to more than 1.3 million men, women and children leaving this land and returning home.

So for all those Americans, who constitute a majority of Americans, eager to see the illegals out, the news is surely welcome. But what exactly are we all cheering?

Are we cheering the success of the government in reversing decades of policy and is now enforcing the law? Well, a lot of that emigration is due to government efforts, from local to federal. Deportation has jumped more than sixty percent inthe past five years. In 2007, some 278,000 people were given the boot. Of that total, almost a third were criminals, or at least prisoners. On the otherend of the scale, more than 18,000 children under the age of eighteen weredeported – in more than 10,000 of those cases, they were sent alone.

More than 40,000 women were sent packing since January. One extra problem: Many of the women, and children, too, have been dropped at the border by immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the middle of the night, hardly a safe landing considering the violent and lawless state of the Mexican border towns.

While all that may constitute a nice haul, what’s really much more interesting is that numbers of Mexicans and other Latinos are choosing to leave of their own volition. And no, not because of the voluntary program that ICE had been promoting to considerable fanfare since August 5, and which has snared precisely eight people. ICE just announced it is dumping the program.

The reason Mexicans are leaving is the slumping American economy. As our economy slows,many illegals are heading home. It makes sense: They came here for work, and not finding it, are calling it quits.

It’s capitalism at its most elemental: People follow the jobs. Of course, this will put even more pressure on Mexico and other Latin countries, already unable to provide labor and basic services to the people already in their midst, never mind an influx of homecoming citizens. But that's an entirely different problem, with its own fresh set of ramifications. For now, let's consider how a faltering economy will accomplish what no fence is capable of: Inspiring people to pack up and follow their self-interest.

Reality trumps rhetoric, the personal beats out the political. Those who have come to the U.S. to pursue the American Dream in its fullness, who seek to be active participants in our democracy, will stay, no matter the sinking housing market and shrinking job opportunities. They will find a way to survive and, eventually, succeed. Those who have come here in order to better feed their families waiting in their village, or build a small nest egg to start a business back home, will depart, searching for greener, or at least more familiar, pastures.

For all the talk about what destroyed the Soviet Union – U.S. military spending, restless satellites, its Afghanistan war – the simple fact was the inherent illogic of the communist economic model caused the entire system to collapse. Whatever proxy wars we fought, hot and cold, to defeat the Soviets were nothing compared to the impossibility of sustaining an empire saddled by an economy that was guaranteed to fail.

It’s like the end of “War of the Worlds” - all our weapons and plans did nothing to stop the space invaders, it was invisible microbes, part of Mother Nature, which inexorably ate away and killed the aliens.

In the Soviet case, we sometimes forgot to have faith in the fundamental rightness of our way of life, and relied on dictatorial surrogates and brutal tactics not worthy of us to fight the red menace. In our current immigration crisis, we must recognize a few facts: They came here because we wanted them to, because our economy needed them; many will leave as our economy can no longer provide them with the incentive to stay; and those who remain will either eventually become absorbed into America and emerge as taxpaying, contributing, proud Americans, or will be forced to remain a foreign shadow, trapped between two worlds, both an irritant and a necessity.

What happens to that last group will not be primarily up to them, but to us, and we are clearly unsettled. In a poll published just today, seventy-one percent of voters in six Western states declared their support for efforts to curb illegal immigration. At the same time, fifty-three percent of those same Americans favored laws that would allow those immigrants already in the country to have achance to apply for legal status, rather than be deported.

Capitalism is doing its part to push matters forward, but it will not decide everyone’s fate, because the urge for freedom, for liberty, for a new life, is not only an economic choice. Those so moved await the decision of those who already possess the right to speak and vote and decide.