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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
Well, we didn’t really secure anything until about a century ago. So does your slogan mean that the United States didn’t exist until then?
I can completely understand why Democrats want unlimited immigration of undereducated, unskilled, third world voters. California may be a disaster, but it’s a one-party disaster with full Democrat dominance. Much like Detroit.
As for Republicans, as far as I can figure, they don’t care that their Party will be demolished in the future as long as they can cash in before that happens.
This isn’t a good argument. The US effectively did have borders created by the massive size of the land and oceans that stood between us and other nations.
Technology shrunk the size of those natural obstacles with faster modes of transportation. It is perfectly reasonable that we didn’t have to do this in the past, but now have to.
Yeah, but this is immigration from Mexico we’re talking about.
I think you are over estimating how much value there was in living in the southern parts of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona 100 years ago.
There was very little there. It was a massive land border between any valuable piece of U.S. land and the cities of Mexico.
We didn’t have an expeditionary military before the Barbary Pirates. The Constitution charges the federal with providing for the common defense so it seems appropriate that the federal government addressed the issue consistent with its Constitutional mandate.
James of England:
“…There’s a good basic map of the fence below…. 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.”
The some reason lies in the name, “Rio Grande Valley.” From a pure engineering standpoint it is probably a couple of orders of magnitude in increased difficulty to build anything in the middle of a flowing body of water. From a political point of view, what voting landowner wants to be walled off from his waterfront property? From the environmental permitting perspective, you could permit it in the U.S. uplands, down to “Top of Bank”, after years of studies with respect to potential wildlife impacts. One inch down from Top of Bank and you just proposed the lengthiest Dredge and Fill Permit application in history. As a taxpayer and, therefore, the client, I would be well advised to run away from this proposed project. I would advise the client to aggressively pursue internal enforcement of existing regulations, as an alternative to the erection of a dike, thousands of miles long.
Of course, Trump would propose to erect it in the Mexican uplands and have Mexico pay for it.
We also didn’t have a massive welfare state 100 years ago. I tend to agree with the Libertarians that mass immigration is incompatible with a welfare state. I believe limiting immigration is slightly more likely to happen than dismantling or reforming the welfare/entitlement state, although the chances for either happening are remote. I honestly expect both conditions to continue until the nation collapses utterly beneath unsustainable debt and social chaos.
We have to maintain the glorious welfare state even if it means enslaving our children to debt. Absent the debt-funded welfare state it is hard to socialize consequences.
I think our immigration policy needs to be considered in light of our foreign aid allocations and expenditures.
For many people on both the Left and the Right, having a lax border is an act of charity, in which case it should be evaluated as such. I think rather than looking at the issue from the sovereignty or legal point of view, if we, as a nation, are going to come to terms with what is now an inconsistent and chaotic policy, we need to look at it from the point of view of asking, what is the best way to help these people? What should our goals and objectives be in meting out our charitable dollars?
That issue should also be looked at in our State Department placements of asylum seekers and refugees. How do our immigration policies fit in with our foreign aid and military budgets and objectives?
I prefer to live in the present, Fred. Who gives a rip about the last century’s issues? Unless of course we can learn from their experience, which at this temporal distance and with the wholesale changes in world demographics, is unlikely. You can call my statement a slogan if you like, but it hardly changes the truth to do so.
James; while we are ‘Rejoicing’ are we seriously talking about a million plus illegals entering a year?
We are talking about more illegals each year than the single populations of all cities in the United States except the top 10… that’s a lot of ‘Rejoicing’ to deal with.
And those new million are supported by who?
Thank you for this comment. There are a number of things in there that I hadn’t considered before.
Firstly, I don’t think that there are a million plus illegal immigrants entering a year.
Secondly, they’re somewhat separate categories. An ever increasing proportion of illegal immigrants are visa overstays. This is a problem (although, for reasons I’ll try to go into on my next immigration post, these are generally better illegal immigrants to have). The levels are a concern, but they’re not a border concern. Even though bad things are happening elsewhere in America, we should celebrate good things when they happen.
We should also rejoice at the success we’re having on the border for other reasons. The suggestion that we’re not a nation without a major border patrol is historically illiterate, but it’s certainly true that it’s helpful for the rule of law, security, and such to have the border be solid.
Obviously, this depends on the million claim, which seems implausible to me, but it also depends on legalistic definitions of city populations. Judge by the metro area, by how people live rather than by gerrymandered boundaries, and the annual illegal immigrant population is unlikely to crack the top 90 (Huntsville, Alabama, is that 90th place).
As I say, I’ll try go into a little detail about why people who qualify for visas (which you need to be to overstay one) are more likely to be self supporting in my next immigration post.
There are certainly portions of the Texas border where the fence would be hard to build. Even in the Rio Grande Valley, though, there are significant chunks that are still available to build on. It’s true that there seems to be a lot of anti-wall sentiment in Texas, but it’s also true that the fence is a Federal institution, somewhat insulated from the whining of Texans. We now have a Texas governor who is less ideologically opposed to the enforcement of immigration law than his predecessors, and it seems likely to me that the next President will substantially enhance the nation’s border security at its weakest point. It won’t be perfect, but perfection is never really the most sensible goal.
When you say “the Libertarians”, I think you should probably lose the capitalization. Without capitals, libertarians are people who want limited government. With the capitals, Libertarians are members of the Libertarian Party, which nominated Gary Johnson and ran last cycle on a mass immigration plus welfare platform (there were other features, but the full list included the positions that you note to be incompatible in small l libertarian thought; there are a lot of areas where libertarians and Libertarians are on opposite sides of the issues). Most of their recent nominees have also run on welfare + mass immigration.
If you care about the meaning of words, their definition matters. It seems that you agree that the US of Teddy Roosevelt was not a nation by your definition. I don’t know if you also agree that France is not a nation by your definition, nor just about any other country on earth (North Korea seems like one of the strongest cases, although isolated island nations often have pretty clear borders, too).
If your argument is that the definition of “nation” has changed, then that’s fine, but it’s a surprising enough claim that it seems reasonable to ask you to expand on it. When did the change take place? Why? What sources use the definition in this way?
There was a series of 19th century Presidents for whom the Southern border, and US/ Mexican migration was one of the leading concerns, sometimes the leading concern, of their Presidency. The Canadian border, too, has not always been a gentle or uncontroversial one and a number of American Presidents (with some crossover, for example with Tyler and Polk). Native American borders have often been important, too.
By a century ago, it might have seemed that geography had the impact you suggest, with the border having quietened somewhat, but not to those with a keen eye on the news. Not only did Wilson enhance the federal efforts at border security, he was also interested in military support. At this point in 1915, Wilson was blocking the border with the intent of denying weapons to Pancho Villa. Ten weeks more, and Pancho Villa would begin his first raid into New Mexico. It’s true that Colombus, NM, is not the most valuable piece of US land, but we benefit from America exerting her sovereignty and protection even to poor Americans, and the invasion was a prominent issue.
One year and twelve days from a century ago, the Zimmerman telegraph, which promised Mexico the ability to shift the Southern border, was one of the primary motivations for the US entering the second bloodiest war that she has ever engaged with. Admittedly, it did not bloody the US so much, but it was not completely clear how limited American involvement was going to be. Again, it was pretty clear that Wilson considered the Southern border states to be valuable, and I don’t believe many Americans would disagree with him on that point.
I note that you sneakily leave California off your list, since your claim is more obviously false there than elsewhere, although it is also false elsewhere; Yuma, for instance, has some cash.
“The folks on my side”? So far as I’m aware, we’re on roughly the same side of most immigration related political controversies. The sorts of bills I listed as being likely to continue to be passed are all solidly pro-enforcement. Are you opposed to any of those laws? I don’t see why they would be likely to render America more Californian.
I agree that Latin Americans tend, like everyone else in the world, to be to the left of Americans.
This seems like a wholly fair characterization of my position. We should not take the continued existence of bank robberies to mean that we should not have laws against them. We should strive to minimize their occurrence. We should celebrate their ever shrinking numbers. In 2014, the most recent year I’ve seen statistics for, there were three people killed in bank robberies, two employees and a customer. Each of those deaths is, obviously, a tragedy, but reducing death rates below one in a hundred million seems like something of an achievement.
In the same way, V the K points out that Obama’s refugee resettlement is going to cost the average American about $5 in taxes this year (the average American in the bottom 95% income bracket will pay a little over $2). It’s not really about border security, but, as with bank robbery victims, the somewhat minor scale of the complaints lends a reassuring note to the existential crisis tone.
If you’re saying that internal enforcement and border security are separate topics, then, yes, I agree with you, which I why I separated them. We’ll have a chance to talk about the internal enforcement in the internal enforcement thread.
Right. It’s not the determining factor. It is an important one, though. The pressure on the US immigration system in general, visa applications and such, has shot up partly because America is richer and partly because the world is richer and more integrated and hence travel comparatively cheaper and more desirable.
The reverse flow of Mexican immigration since the recession is partly because of Mexico’s economy improving, partly because of the slower growth in the US under Obama, but also partly because of the improvements in security. You can see this in part because of the disparate impact of disparate security efforts; California, Arizona, and New Mexico have all put far more effort in than Texas, particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, and so border crossings have moved in that direction, despite Arizona and such still having pretty robust economies and despite much of the immigration being headed for Northern states like Iowa and Illinois.
They don’t have zero effect, and different improvements have different kinds of effects. Reagan’s improvements were helpful, but it’s really the fence that’s been the biggest thing. There’s just nothing to compare to it in terms of enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the Patrol. Improved technical support has helped too, so that we can now take people’s biometrics in the field. Also, the expansions have been exponential, so each of the doubling, then doubling again, then tripling has been building on the success of previous efforts.
If you don’t think that expanding enforcement personnel by an order of magnitude makes much of a difference, why do you not object when candidates you like push to double or triple their numbers? I support most of this spending because I think it accomplishes something important, but it always confuses me when people want more of what they feel is worthless.
If, despite those three laws you pointed to, illegal immigration increased, then yes, there will be a California-ization of the US when Rubio signs the next “comprehensive reform bill.” As I have been stating this entire thread, if you think that increased resources for immigration enforcement is the equivalent of enforcement itself, then the increase in the number of illegals during this time period kind of blows that out of the water.
I would actually include visa overstays with the walking across our border from Mexico because at its very essence they are the same thing. I would define internal enforcement as whether or not to process an illegal immigrant who has been here for a few years. That’s probably not how you would define it, but that is where I am differentiating the two concepts. If it can be determined in a relatively short period of time that I have cheated on my taxes, then why can’t we find visa overstays?
To the extent that we have a “crisis tone” I think it revolves around the blatant display of the flouting of our laws. Are there concerns less philosophical than that? I am sure there are, but I think that is just window dressing for what the real issue is. The real issue is that there is a political elite who doesn’t seem interested in executing the requirements of the Constitutional system we have, a business elite who thinks that any law standing in the way of their bottom line is expendable, and a 5th column that believes an increase in third world attitudes will further the advancement of the cultural Marxists who are destroying this Republic.
Again, you cannot claim an increase in resources for “border security” is working while at the same time demonstrating that the outflow of Hispanic illegals coincides with economic factors. If the increase in resources were working then there would not be an increase in illegals from the South during boom years, nor would there be a migration back to the south in down years for the US and boom years in Mexico. Could it be that the economy of Texas is far outperforming the other three states? (In the case of California, that is demonstrably so. I would guess the same is true of Texas vs New Mexico. Arizona might be a push.)
The issues are different because you can’t build a wall to stop the people flying in. Sure, breast cancer and prostate cancer are the same in their very essence — cells dividing uncontrollably — but that doesn’t mean the same chemo and surgeries work for both.
Yes.
(Continued)
I don’t necessarily think that increased personnel is a bad thing. Obviously where there are BPAs catching people walking across there is going to be an effect in my favor. But what happens when the illegal is brought in for processing? The guy in San Fran who killed that young lady was caught and processed FIVE times before he finally killed her. I recognize this would probably fit into your “internal security” category, but it goes back to my point that increases in resources at the border are NOT having an effect on the overall situation as evidenced by the guy in San Fran, not to mention any number of cases I am sure we can find throughout the country.
The reason why I might like one politicians claims that mirror some one else could boil down to me having more faith in one over the other. Let’s put some names to this. McCain, before he was pro-fence was vehemently anti-fence. In 2008 there was a Vanity Fair piece quoting him directly saying that he would build it if it would shut people like me up. Regarding Rubio, how in the hell do you rise in the ranks of the GOP and NOT know who you are dealing with in Chuck Schumer? Say what you want about Cruz’s plan, at least he didn’t stand shoulder to shoulder with Satan telling people he was going to bring the kingdom of heaven.
Thank you.
James, this is not looking good for you man.
Okay that’s a fair statement. But if Hispanic illegal immigration is more a reflection of economics, then would it not make more sense to put the resources James is touting in airports or seaports instead of on the southern border and begin the process of keeping tabs on people entering via the visa method so that you can better enforce that aspect of immigration when they overstay their welcome? Either way you look at it, the ability to illegally enter this country is relatively easy and there is no desire to stop those who want to get in illegally from doing so. We are either depending on economic circumstances or we are throwing up our hands in frustration because of overstays, which by the way, we do not do in any other aspect of our legal system (maybe drugs but that is on a state by state basis).
I’m not sure how that follows. James is saying that most border crossing immigration happens in Texas because that’s where Rick Perry and Texas Republicans decided they’d rather have Mexican immigrants than a Federal fence. Texas also has one of the best economies in the nation, so it’s logical that if one does want to come to the US for work, Texas is the place to be.
How does that disprove that where we do have a fence, it’s working?
Also, I would argue that James’ argument, keeping with your cancer analogy, is that only one cancer is to be treated with chemo and surgery while the other cancer is to be treated entirely different. My argument is that, yes there is a different in doses for the Chemo, but it’s still Chemo isn’t it? You aren’t going to use a drone in an airport to track people coming on a visa, but you can certainly use a Border Patrol Agent to check those getting in the US into a database that notes when their visa is up and can then notify them AND the US a certain amount of time before expiration so that both can prepare for the overstay–one either renewing the visa or the other beginning to locate for deportation.
James’ argument was that New Mexico, California, and Arizona have stepped up their border security while Texas hasn’t and that is why there is an uptick in border crossings there. My argument is that it is the economic draw of the Texas economy vs the other three states that could be the actual factor behind this. You provided the economic back up to my assertion.
I think the tell would be if Texas’s economy was not far and away better than the other three states, but the inflow from Mexico was roughly the same as it is now. Then we would have a clearer view as to whether or not the fence is working.