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Time for the Beverly Hills, upper West Side and Martha's Vineyard and London Zionists to put their behind where their mouth is?

The run-up to the end of 2007 is upon us and the papers are going to be full of various unimportant statistics of how many this year, more or less, and what can we expect for 2008.

Hiding somewhere on the back pages, beneath all these meaningless figures will be the immigration numbers for the last year. Don't hold your breath, they're going to be down again. The January to November figures paint a very clear picture, and if there wasn't a sudden wave this month (and there wasn't), then immigration will have been down 7 or 8 percent this year. Only about 18,000 Jews came from around the world this year to live in the Jewish state. And what makes the statistics even more grim reading is the country-by-country numbers; there are no signs of hope for the future.

Last year, when immigration was also down, there was, at least, an upward trend coming from the English-speaking countries, primarily the U.S. and Britain. This year, Anglo immigration is also down. There is an increase in immigrants coming from Latin America, but those numbers are negligible in the overall picture. And immigration from Ethiopia is also slightly up, but since 2007 was probably the very last year of mass immigration from that country, and the government has decided that from June no more Falashmura will be allowed in; their immigration numbers will have dwindled in the coming year. But are these numbers necessarily a bad thing? Arik Sharon used to speak of bringing a million immigrants over the next decade. Now, it doesn't look as if we'll be getting even a quarter of that sum… Read on!