The nonexistent border of Trump’s imagination
The White House last week demanded that Congress pay for President Trump’s “big, beautiful” border wall to secure his mercy for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. It was the latest acknowledgment that the endlessly repeated promise that Mexico would underwrite his monument to paranoia was as untethered from reality as it sounded.
The administration’s continuing immigration crackdown is similarly free of a basis in fact, as a new federal report affirms. Contrary to Trump’s relentlessly xenophobic policies and pronouncements, the report finds that by the time he assumed office, the southern border was experiencing “the lowest number of illegal entries at least since 2000, and likely since the early 1970s.”
On every measure, the Homeland Security Department’s Office of Immigration Statistics notes, “available data indicate that the southwest land border is more difficult to illegally cross today than ever before.” Government-commissioned research estimates that illegal border crossings plummeted more than 90 percent over the past two administrations, from 1.8 million in 2000 to 170,000 last year.
The 409,000 border arrests made in 2016 were among the four lowest annual tallies since 1972, the report notes, which given improved apprehension rates is thought to reflect fewer crossing attempts. Over the past decade, the Border Patrol’s rate of success in capturing or deterring known efforts to enter the country illegally increased from 69 to 83 percent, while the number of migrants known to have eluded the agency dropped by about half a million a year. Accounting for undetected crossings, the Border Patrol’s estimated rate of capture and deterrence rose from 49 to 75 percent during that period. (The report notes that a 100 percent rate is not considered “realistic or cost-effective.”)
Authorities also appear to have dissuaded more of the most determined migrants. The Border Patrol has caught an average of 55 percent of repeat offenders in recent years, according to one estimate, up from a low of 33 percent in 2003. The incidence of repeat attempts within a year seems to have declined too, accounting for only 12 percent of arrests last year, down from 31 percent in 2005. Surveys also show a sharp increase in the share of those arrested who don’t try to cross again.
In still another sign of the unprecedented difficulty of sneaking across the southern border, government surveys have found that most of those trying to do so now hire professional smugglers — up to 95 percent, compared with 50 percent or less in the 1970s. The smugglers’ going rates also suggest greater difficulty, having climbed from an average of less than $500 in the early 1980s (adjusted for inflation) to nearly $4,000 today.
As the Homeland Security report notes, every means of gauging illegal immigration, an inherently clandestine activity, has weaknesses. But it’s striking that so many different measures lead to the same conclusion: that illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border has never been harder.
Considering that the Border Patrol has more than doubled in size since 2000, it’s no wonder. U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now the nation’s largest law enforcement agency, even though more Mexicans have been leaving than entering the United States since the Great Recession and the estimated number in the country illegally has declined by over a million.
The administration nevertheless vowed to hire another 5,000 border agents, a task expected to test the agency’s ability to find enough applicants. Meanwhile, a House committee recently voted for a $10 billion down payment on the president’s “great, great” border wall, three-story prototypes of which are rising in San Diego. And last week, after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law protecting California’s undocumented residents from the increasingly cruel federal dragnet, Trump’s immigration chief threatened mass roundups.
It all amounts to a remarkable response to an emergency that, according to the same federal government, does not exist.