points of comparison produce somewhat different results, the overall picture that emerges from Figures 3 and 4 is that the less-educated, young, Hispanic immigrant population has declined in a way that is without precedent in this decade and even going all the way back to 1994. Enforcement vs. the Economy. Figure 5 examines the size of the likely illegal immigrant population going back to January 1994, when the Census Bureau began collecting data on the foreign born on a regular basis. 15 (As in all prior figures, Figure 5 uses a three-month moving average.) Until recently, the overall trend since 1994 was clearly upward, though there were fluctuations. 16 The lower line in the figure shows the unemployment rate for less-educated young immigrant Hispanics. The figure shows some fluctuations in the size of this population due to a number of factors, including sampling variability, seasonality, enforcement efforts, and economic conditions in the United States and the home countries. In general, the illegal population tends to grow most in the spring and summer, though seasonality is not clearly present in all years. Figure 5 shows that the recent fall in the number of less-educated, young, foreign-born Hispanics began in 2007, before there was a significant jump in their unemployment rate. 17 The decline in the size of the likely illegal population was statistically significant before there was a statistically significant rise in their unemployment rate. This makes sense because, as shown in Figure 1, the recession did not officially begin until