[cripplecreek]

So what did New Mexico do to get a break on the illegals? They kinda stick out like a sore thumb among southern border states.

[Carthego delenda est]

“So what did New Mexico do?”

I think they just get routed to the motor vehicle division to get instant citizenship and pre-absentee vote a few times.

[OneWingedShark]

Well, there's probably several reasons for it:

1. NM has traditionally been a democrat-voting state.
   (Not that I think there's any difference between the parties.)
2. It has an already high percentage of hispanic people — this can have interesting dynamics (a lot [surprising for the area] of hispanics here don't take too kindly to illegal immigrants [essentially the term hispanic is too broad to capture differences]).
3. There's a high percentage of catholics.
4. Given the prevalence of speaking Spanish for legal/historical reasons [See NM Constitution: Art XII, Sec 8 and Art XX, Sec 12, and Art XIX, Sec 1] a Mexican might be able to blend in and thus not be recorded.
5. NM tends to be overlooked a surprising amount; remember that image of Fast & Furious guns? It was blank for NM because nobody got that data. There was even a somewhat locally-famous case against a family that owned a gun-shop that came about with some very questionable information/informants/investigators.

So, given all of the above I would be unsurprised if both (a) the image under-reports NM, and (b) there's fewer shipped here because One of Our Fifty is Missing.