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Rejoice! Our Border Is More Secure Than Ever!
In this series, I’m looking at the changes made since Reagan took power and since Obama lost his supermajority. I’m breaking immigration down to three posts: border security, internal enforcement, and amnesty. I start with border security, because it is the most misunderstood.
Unless one’s concern with immigration focuses on East Asians, Jews, or Italians — in which case things have certainly become more liberal over the last century (but not the last half century) — the initial entry point of immigration is more secure than it has ever been. That’s not to say that there are not valid immigration-related concerns, but they really tend to fall into two categories: immigration concerns that are not about border security and concerns that the improved border security has not improved enough. The third category of “border security is less effective” is a null set.
Background
The first real efforts at border security came under Teddy Roosevelt, because of course they did. He created the “Mounted Watchmen” — a grand total of 75 at their height — mostly operating out of El Paso. Wilson took the next step: the “Immigrant Inspectors” got motor vehicles and a couple of boats and the number of boats would not significantly increase until George W. Bush. They also got offices, broadly setting up the system for the 20th Century. Saint Calvin Coolidge created the Border Patrol in 1924 and increased its personnel to 450, largely in response to prohibition era smuggling (notably absent from Amity Schlaes’ account). Eisenhower started a practice of tracking flights across the border.
Since there was no quota on Mexican immigration until 1964 (you could still immigrate illegally, but the incentives were more about avoiding the paperwork than about entering the country), the Border Patrol was pretty heavily focused on law enforcement of more traditional kinds. As such, Nixon’s war on drugs was something of a boon to border enforcement.
Reagan
As any libertarian will tell you, Reagan militarized the border. For the first time, helicopter gunships and airplanes with TV cameras and infrared sensors were deployed, along with seismic, magnetic, and acoustic sensors. There was even a fence, of sorts (they used a small amount of chain link fencing). If you care to sample some liberal tears on the subject, this 1997 book is a pretty good place to start. Imagine the misery of the author as every concern he has becomes stronger, as every issue he fights for turns out to be one that he loses. Reagan supported amnesty but supporting amnesty does not mean being weak on the border, and Reagan most certainly was not weak on the border. Just how transformative he was can be seen in the chart on page 97 of this book. You will also see that Reagan’s expansions were just a foretaste of what was to come.
The most obvious thing you will see in the chart is the enormous difference made by the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which conservatives often deride as having delivered amnesty without delivering the accompanying promised security. It did provide the amnesty, and a worse amnesty than was anticipated (many later immigrants were able to fraudulently backdate their entry), but it really did increase security as well. I’ll return to that in my post on internal enforcement, because E-Verify is also authorized under the IRCA, although that obviously took a long time to come to fruition.
After Reagan, Aside from the Fence
The Atlantic has quite a nice chart describing the increase of border patrol agents from 1992 to 2011.
As you can see, the numbers of agents on the border has not merely increased, but exploded, and on a bipartisan basis. They’ve done this during a period when federal employees in general have shrunk from a little over 3 million people to a little under 2.7. In case you’re concerned by those numbers still appearing a little low, rest assured that the number of border patrol agents for 2016 is set to be 21,370 in the DHS budget, and the Omnibus funds that fully. Employment numbers are not the data that changes the most, though. Agents are also dramatically better equipped and supported than their predecessors, as this chart I made from this data shows.
Since I’ve repeatedly claimed that nominal dollars are not a meaningful statistic over the long term, here’s that chart again as a percentage of GDP.
Border Patrol agents now have a vast array of muscle behind them. They have drones, sophisticated sensors, boats (a whole lot more than they used to), remote cameras. They have vehicles that allow them to easily move additional monitoring capabilities to any place they choose, with electro-optical, infrared, radar, and laser, sensors alongside a host of command and control gadgetry. It should go without saying that the latest in aircraft for these things also have a terrific variety of different tools to track, monitor, and record illegal border crossers such that they can be easily arrested and can be swiftly convicted. Their sensors are smarter than they used to be, and better at working out what the agents need to be alerted to. They have sophisticated biometric field equipment so that they can identify people they run into without documents. And, of course, they have the fence.
The Fence
There are a lot of misconceptions about the fence; many think of it as some kind of analog to the Berlin Wall. As a result, claims are made about a fifteen-foot fence being defeated by a sixteen-foot ladder. In fact, the fence is not designed to be impossible to scale. There are two chief functions to the fence. Firstly, although it is possible to drive from Mexico City to the border, get out, put your stuff in a rucksack, climb over the fence, and have your buddy from LA pick you up on the other side, that’s an awful lot more hassle than simply driving yourself; stopping vehicles is valuable. To analogize, it is more or less impossible to make your home secure against people who would break in, but you’re likely to reduce the rate at which that happens in neighborhoods with many budding criminals if you have a door that locks.
More importantly, the fence makes it easy to see when people are crossing the border. When the Border Patrol guys talk about their high tech mobile stations being able to operate on a twelve mile radius, that’s only because of the fence. The fence is not a substitute for agents, but a force multiplier for them, like the sensors, the planes, and all the other things that are dramatically more useful because of the fence.
There was a time when speculation about whether the fence was useful had a place. That was before 1993, before Clinton’s efforts in Operation Hold The Line around El Paso, and more so before 1994’s Operation Gatekeeper at the San Diego border. After that, there was a decade in which it was incontrovertible that the fence worked in built up areas, but one could make the sixteen-foot ladder claim about the rural areas. Now we have the fence built along most of the border, and there is no longer any respectable claim to be made about its efficiency. It’s partly for that reason that Obama (and Clinton) voted for the Secure Fence Act when they were in the Senate and continued building the fence after taking power. He’s mostly stopped now; 2016 should see a sector of fence in Arizona be rebuilt, better than before. This is mostly because the fence is just about complete outside Texas. America’s borders are simply enormous: when I lived in Iraq and Mrs. Of England was in the UK, we were in a shorter-distance relationship than some Americans are who live within the lower 48 states.
There’s a good basic map of the fence below, although weirdly it suggests that there isn’t fence around San Diego, where some of the first fencing was built, and it doesn’t include Obama’s completion of the Secure Fence Act’s remit, since it dates to 2009. Still, it gives a sense of things. In particular, it helps you see why, although the chief point of entry for illegal immigrants used to be San Diego, it’s now the Rio Grande Valley. For some reason, Rick Perry and a large number of other Texan Republicans have been simply terrible on the wall.
Border Arrests
When I was riding along with the Border Patrol a decade back, the complaints about “catch-and-release” had merits. You could talk to would-be immigrants who would be open about having failed to cross one day, but planning to try again tomorrow. The Bush Administration responded by shifting towards a greater emphasis on “removals,” in which people are more likely to be taken into custody, tried, and punished (generally, with a minimum of being excluded from the country on a fairly long term basis being issued, rather than “returns” in which they were simply deposited back on their own side of the border).
This was stepped up yet further with Obama’s “consequence delivery mechanism” and numerous reforms streamlining the immigration judicial system, so that now up to forty people can have a hearing together. Additionally, the Mexico Interior Repatriation Program does what Trump likes about Ike’s immigration enforcement: it deposits Mexicans in the south of the country, rather than back at the border. Similarly, the Alien Transfer Exit program transports Mexicans to a different part of the country than the part they would like to return to. Additionally, courts have access to a variety of other punishments — major and minor — including jail sentences, fines, and such.
This — combined with the fence, the extra guards, the superior monitoring, and gradually improving, if grudging and inconsistent cooperation from the Mexican government — means that the number of people crossing plummeted. Discouraging frequent visiting means that the minority of illegal immigrants who previously made up a substantial portion of returns made a significant impact on its own. Although a number of Republican candidates strongly condemn the Obama and Bush administrations falling rates of “deportations” (by which they mostly mean the catch-and-release stuff), almost all of them would pursue the same policies that lead to that reduction; they, therefore, would be likely to have their own statistics look even worse by the flawed metric being used. As a result, most illegal immigration now takes the form of visa overstays, which cannot be prevented at the border, but which I will address in my post on internal enforcement. The reduction in border crossings has been particularly pronounced in the West. As I mentioned earlier, California used to lead the nation this way, but it’s the Rio Grande Valley and the South East portion of the Texas border that outperform the rest of the nation in letting immigrants through. Immigrant deaths are lower in areas with a fence, too.
There are numerous judicial reforms that allow processing to be conducted more quickly for those who ought to leave. Operation Streamline is the highest profile and has caused many tears on the Left — while remaining almost unknown on the Right — while the numbers of categorized trusted travelers who can pass through the border with quick biometric tests has gone from zero to many in the last decade or so. Today, visa waivers are evaluated before people fly in, meaning that they can be turned away with less hassle than before and that there is plenty of time to examine the cases without being too much of a jerk about it. Anyone who has traveled through, say, Dulles airport internationally and who knows where to look will have noticed that the speed through which one can travel through immigration has greatly improved when there is no cause for concern, but there is more attention paid to screening the difficult cases. The recidivism rate for illegal entry appears to have almost halved (fig. 7; the whole report is pretty interesting).
There was a concern in 2014 that children deliberately getting arrested represented a tremendous loophole in effective security; there’s really no way of stopping people from crossing and surrendering to the authorities. Thankfully, collaboration with Mexican and other authorities seems to have worked as numbers appear to have dropped off in 2015 and that awful debate ought not to become the new normal. Since I wrote this, I’ve been alerted to a spike in the last couple of reported months, suggesting that fiscal 2016 may be above 2015 in unaccompanied children, although it’s still below the average for 2014.
2016
Of the key actors in the upcoming Presidential election, Obama, Clinton, Trump, Bush, Carson, Rubio, and Cruz support the wall and approve of there being an ever growing border patrol. Unless a miracle occurs and Fiorina, Christie, or Sanders wins the nomination, we will have a general election between two fence and border protection advocates. There is a widespread confusion among conservatives that says that x cannot be trusted to improve border security because they support amnesty. It is hard to overstate how incorrect a hermeneutic this is. The most extreme amnesty supporter in the Republican Primary, Jeb Bush, is also the guy who has done the most to improve border security, working with the Coast Guard and other agencies to integrate Florida’s border security systems with each other. In the 2008 Democratic primary, both candidates supported a stronger defense of the border while also both supporting amnesty. There was a concern last year that we would see endless waves of children, but the response seems to have been effective enough that we did not see a wave this year.
If your concern is about a nation needing secure borders to be a real country, then you really need not worry about the US, which has a more fortified and militarized border than almost any country in history. It’s a long border, so the Patrol sometimes takes a while to catch people who cross, but they generally do, and they’re getting better at it all the time, and seem likely to do so for the foreseeable future. Obviously, it’s far from perfect, and one should still worry about a nuke or other horror being smuggled across, but illegal border crossing from Mexico is no longer the sort of demographic threat that it once was.
There is disagreement on the Republican side about how much to grow the immigration bureaucracy, but all of the leading candidates want to do so. Bush hasn’t given figures, but is clear in his book, Immigration Wars, that adding to the force is a priority. Carson is similar. Rubio would double the number of Border Patrol agents, Cruz promises to triple their ranks, Trump would triple the number of ICE agents and, I think, have them take a greater degree of responsibility for the border. Since the actual details will come from Congress, it seems to me that we have a near universal Republican consensus on the conservative position, with the Democrats not being that far behind.
Obviously, as one moves to other areas of immigration policy this stops being the case, but we should not suggest that our borders are unusually weak, too weak to allow ourselves to count as a country; if America doesn’t qualify, just about nowhere in history does. When Trump does it, it’s understandable ignorance. When better informed candidates, lobbyists, and hacks do, it’s because they believe it to be in their interest to mislead you. Instead, we should internalize and celebrate our victory on this issue.
Published in General
James, all of that may be true in #29, but it is still disingenuous for candidates to claim they are strong on national sovereignty, banter about border security, and then not resolutely enforce our laws internally.
a) If we have open borders and lax internal enforcement we have a huge problem with illegal immigration.
b) If we have more secure borders as you outline and lax internal enforcement we have less than the open border scenario, but still far too much and there is no amount of border militarization that will stop it all together.
c) If we have secure borders, strong internal enforcement and no incentives to come here other than assimilate and prosper as Americans as you are apparently doing (not wanting to put words in your mouth) then we will have much less illegal immigration than we do now.
Our current crop of candidates wants us to believe we will have the results of option c while implementing option b and we are not buying it.
Would internal enforcement not qualify as “border security”? I am looking at it as a whole sum, but you appear to be separating the two.
Thank you, JoE. Your post has shed light on many questions I’ve had.
People on the Left have been critical of the Obama administration for being too tough on immigrants, particularly those from Central and South America–it has been difficult to know where the truth was. I have read conflicting information on this, but I read somewhere that the Obama administration has deported more people here in the United States illegally than the any previous administration. One might guess that the Dream Act was a carrot to the Democrats from the administration. The pressure on the southern border has increased over the last eight years, creating a confusing picture of the current state of affairs with regard to illegal immigration. That pressure is likely to get much worse with the worsening situation in Venezuela. And as Donald Trump knows well, the Democratic Party is as divided as the Republican Party on this issue.
I look forward to the rest of the series.
I would encourage this:
I agree they are related. I am addressing them separately out of respect for James’ series.
I think the term “chain migration” may have different meanings in different contexts.
What it meant on Cape Cod when we were dealing with a tremendous influx of Brazilians twenty to thirty years ago was that one person would immigrate legally and buy a house and a car and have a job, and that person would assist a hundred other family members and friends to come to the Cape legally, illegally, on temporary and permanent visas and work permits. It became a standard-of-living issue because we would see twenty people living in a house built for two. It was chaotic. Schools and hospitals found it impossible to set up budgets and maintain their standards.
From what I saw on Cape Cod those years, I would assume that chain migration would occur. In my mind, it’s a given. And I don’t think that’s new. I think that’s been the way such huge “waves” of immigration have always occurred.
And again this does not hold that our border has been secured since 1986. There is a leveling off sometime around the “great recession” but that only means that economic disincentives were the reasons and not increased border security efforts.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/19/5-facts-about-illegal-immigration-in-the-u-s/
Every President from Carter onwards has improved border security, and most of the twentieth century Presidents before him. There has always been an incentive to do this; Americans like border security. If you mean if they didn’t do it in the Nineteenth century then why should we believe that they would do it now, the basic answer is about money and population. The Early Twentieth century saw some fairly intense disagreements with our Southern neighbor, which at times got heated, literally, so there was a sudden incentive, but it would probably not have been logistically and financially possible to man the border then the way that we can man it now. Now we have the resources to make the previously unfeasible feasible.
I wasn’t meaning to put words in your mouth and I apologize if my analogy was inapt. The illegal immigrant population is roughly where it was a decade ago at 11.3. I’m not sure where it was in ’86, but Pew thinks it was about 3.5 million in 1990. That’s a huge climb, although part of the reason that the 1990 figure is so low is because most of those who were illegal before 1986 had been amnestied. Since the fence was built and the border secured, though, the number of Mexican illegal immigrants has declined; it’s just that the number of Asian and other illegal immigrants, mostly visa overstays, has increased. The amnesty mostly targeted Mexicans, as does the wall, but the 12 million figure is a different phenomenon that is more about internal enforcement than border security.
Still, you’re right that after the IRCA, illegal immigration goes up. The reason that this doesn’t damn the IRCA too strongly is that illegal immigration was going up fast before the IRCA, too. Mexicans became richer and more able to travel, the bracero program ended, and there’s a degree to which this sort of immigration is self perpetuating; as increasing numbers immigrated, increasing numbers had friends and family in El Norte.
IRCA didn’t cause immigration to go down, and it may have had a negative effect, but I think that it probably, on net, reduced the flow over the long term. Even if it didn’t, but it was close, I think that bringing people into the system, being able to exclude criminals and such, is more important than a small increase in population. Your mileage may vary.
McCain’s happy to oppose the CoC on other grounds (campaign finance, the EPA). There are many people, including many conservatives (Perry might be a better example, or Bush), who think of this stuff as being about important principles and who pursue amnesty out of their beliefs rather than grubbing for votes. Bush pushed amnesty in his second term, when that wasn’t really a concern. While it’s more obvious for Republicans, since it’s clearly electorally harmful for them, the existence of principled by wrong Republicans on the issue implies the likelihood that some Democrats hold their beliefs on the subject on principled grounds, despite their conclusions being both wrong and being helpful to them.
Okay, then I shall do the same. It is only fair that we all address issues from the same understanding of those issues.
Indeed.
What good would it do to have a million border agents and an Israeli-Gaza quality border wall, if the agents are only there to provide accommodations and hand out welfare applications to incoming illegals? A border that is not enforced is not secure. We may have the accoutrements of Border Security, but we do not have a secure border.
I think your biggest mistake here is to equate the increase in money spent and personnel hired with “border security.” If you mean to say that every president since Carter has spent more money than the previous on “border security,” then I would agree with you. But that does not equate to an actual decrease in the problem of people being able to violate the immigration law of the United States. Again, the numbers bare this out.
Since the fence was built and the border secured, though, the number of Mexican illegal immigrants has declined; it’s just that the number of Asian and other illegal immigrants, mostly visa overstays, has increased.
Okay, then the focus to your piece is immigration from Mexico? I am focused on illegal immigration, period. I would assume Brent is the same. The Hispanic angle to this gets amplified to be sure, but you cannot claim our “border is secure” and then say “only when discussing the Hispanic in flow” and think you have carried the argument.
Oh, James no worries about putting words in my mouth. We are all friends here. I was looking for a debate tactic to use and you gave me one, thanks.
Family reunification visas make legally explicit what has at other times been merely an extra-legal fact or legally implicit. Chain migration with anchor babies is more challenging than one might think, but chain migration with adult families is a substantial issue. Most comprehensive immigration reform efforts at least partly reduce chain migration. It’s a particular bugbear for Jeb!, who possibly focuses on that more than any other element of his preferred reforms.
Why stop there? Compared to a century or so ago, we have around three hundred times as many guys. Heck, we may have more guys with horses now than they did then. Go back further and we have infinitely more. I don’t think that one can arrive at the correct number of policemen (which is essentially what much of the Patrol is) from first principles alone, unless your answer is zero or a sort of North Korean everyone is expected to be an enforcer sort of deal.
This statement does more harm to your overall argument. If IRCA was a factor in the increase in “border security,” yet did nothing to curtail illegal immigration, then we did not then nor do we now have “border security.”
I don’t think the illegal immigration problem will be solved as long as business interests align with political interests in the import of millions of units of cheap labor that support large confiscatory Government.
Americans workers… because they are unwilling to share 2 bedroom apartments with 20 other people… are deemed too expensive, too demanding by employers. They pay well to ensure that Government will not impede the flow. The Democrat Party, which has seen unchecked immigration turn California into a one-party state hope to repeat the model nationwide.
This seems to me the key point, there already exists a massive population of illegal immigrants in this nation. Robust border enforcement can keep the problem from getting worse but it does not remediate the issue of having a large population of non-citizens residing within the United States.
There was an absolute explosion of illegal aliens taking up residence during the Clinton and Bush administrations.
This addresses Fred’s point, not mine, unless I’m missing something.
It’s not a problem; I just don’t want readers to think my point was the same as Fred’s. :)
Edit: My browser must be acting up. I now can see JoE’s reply. :)
My retort to this would be what is the level of activity by the CoC regarding immigration compared to EPA or campaign finance? I would bet that they are much more energized by amnesty than the other two.
The principles of the Democrats is to create another “black vote” and increase their power. The principles of the pro-amnesty Republicans is “don’t call us racist.” Basically, there are no principles unless you are looking at folks who are advocating that we enforce our laws and protect our sovereignty as a free nation. McVain isn’t that kind of person.
I used the word discussion inappropriately. Just surprised the post header wasn’t sarcasm after all.
I am skeptical that the Obama Administration’s figures on illegal immigration are any more legitimate than their economic statistics.
This one is on border security. Visa overstays cannot be prevented by even the most amazing border security, because it doesn’t happen near a border.
Good point. I noted the non-governmental drives for more illegal immigration increased (also, American wealth went from being merely absurdly luxurious to Trump branded goods levels of classy), and it’s fair to say that that’s part of security.
Still, those Presidents improved the governmental inputs toward security, which is really all one would want them to do. If a candidate promised to destroy the prosperity that is our chief magnet, I would oppose that policy. The cumulative impact has been to halt and reverse that growth of illegal border crossing. We’re a little behind on internal enforcement, but that’s also improving.
Thank you, Brent, for helping me to segregate the topics even when I’m not being helpful.
Do you think that their statistics for detained aliens, for arrests, for border patrol agents, for the numbers of drones, hours flown, and such are likely to be faked? For the most part the statistics on immigration are the inputs, which it’s pretty easy for the government to be precise about. If you mean the numbers of illegal immigrants in the country then, sure, that’s a considerably softer number. It’s produced by Pew, though, rather than the government. The government publishes tremendous amounts of studies, but even the woman who writes those gives a tip of the hat to Pew.
The Obama statistics are mostly continuations of the graph shapes that start under Bush. Do you believe his statistics?
IRCA increased both the magnet and border security (and internal enforcement) against a background of increasing illegal immigration. I think that it was a small help, but I can see the other argument.
The subsequent legislation (the Immigration Act under 41, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Control Act under Clinton, and the REAL ID and Secure Fence Acts under 43) together with budgets that mandate spending are less ambiguous, and the results have been less ambiguous. If we have a Republican President in a little over a year, I’d be surprised if we didn’t have another in that line of legislation, and we might get it under Clinton.
Again I find this to be the old “we have laws against robbing banks, but it happens” argument. The fact that people break our immigration law is separate from the fact that enforcing those laws when they get in, despite an increase in resources for “border security,” has been dismal.
If economic activity in the US is the determining factor behind illegal immigration, then that kind of blows up your entire piece doesn’t it? Increased resources for “border security” having zero effect when compared to economic factors kind of speaks to the problem that folks like me have with the whole issue.
The mistake I see is throwing more and more bodies, and more and more cash, at the problem. (Which, we didn’t decide was an actual problem until the 1980s.)
See, here’s the thing: In 20 years, we’ve seen a six fold increase in the number of employees here. And we know that number is never going back down. Not only is there a hysteria over supposed swarms of illegals coming in from Mexico, but now there’s a yet another government bureaucracy/interest group dedicated indefinite self-perpetuation.
Who would you consider a reliable source?
And the US will go further down the road to look like California does now. I for the life of me cannot understand why folks on your side cannot look at the voter tendencies of the “Si Se Puede” crowd and think it wise to give them full citizenship. Or make the argument that “we already have a secure border so let us deliver amnesty to those here.”
I can’t wait for your followup post about the how many government employees the military and police have.
At this point, no one. There are too many organizations and agencies with political and economic incentives to downplay the numbers and fiscal impact of illegal immigration. To what degree, for example, have Obama administration initiatives to reclassify some illegal immigrants as “refugees” and shelter others under DACA affected the statistical reporting of illegal immigration numbers?
The Soviet Union had a range of methods to manipulate statistics for political advantage, and the Obama Administration is very much of a Soviet Mindset.