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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
That’s not what he’s saying. This essay is how the border control is working, and he’s writing another about how internal enforcement is working. He’s not saying that we don’t need both, just that to discuss both at the same time will confuse the points he’s trying to make about each one.
To go back to the medical analogy, right now we’re talking about the radiation treatment, and the next essay will be about the chemo.
I understand that. But what he is leaving out of his “border” aspect is that applying for a student visa in New Deli and flying to LA is also part of border security. What we don’t do–which is obvious if his argument is that the bulk of illegal immigration comes from overstays–is devise a method of recording those entrants and keeping tabs on them during their stay so that if there is an overstay we can deport them. The recording them at entrance is what his border piece is missing. I think because he is wrongly classifying it as internal security.
1) James knows a bit more about deportations of those trying to overstay on student visas than you might think.
2) I think I understand your point — you’re thinking of border security as “security at the point of entry.” James is defining it at the physical border to deal with the fence and border crossing issues separately from visa checking, visa follow up, and employment verifications. Again, it’s not that those issues are any less important to the integrity of our borders and immigration system, but rather that those issues don’t require fences and patrol drones and people looking down from watch towers. Better to deal with those issues separately for clarity.
Not really. I leave California out of my thinking most of the time.
No, illegal immigration slowed after that. Illegal immigration is currently at pretty low levels, with the illegal immigrant population having leveled off since the fence got built.
Ah, you were responding as if I’d suggested that a comprehensive immigration reform would increase immigration. I don’t think it would (basically, if had a 1986 style increase in enforcement with today’s starting point and today’s technology, I think that an increased magnet could be more than outweighed by that improved enforcement), but that’s not really this thread’s topic.
I think that it helps. Reagan’s adding a thousand guys made a lot less difference than Bush adding ten thousand, the fence, improving ID requirements, and other reforms. E-verify makes a big difference, and since E-verify started to bite we haven’t had elevated illegal immigration levels. It just took a long time from the IRCA for that to happen.
No. They have some things in common, but the enforcement mechanisms you need, the threats presented, and a range of other issues are very different.
I define internal enforcement as being enforcement that does not originate at the border crossing.
We should be much better at it, and we’re getting there, but you’re right that that’s totally about internal enforcement, which I’m trying to stave off for its own thread.
Just to be clear, I have never tried to overstay on a student, or any other visa.
I’d include airports and visa issuance as part of border security. I even mentioned airports. I didn’t get into visa scrutiny as a subject because it’s relatively complicated and there isn’t so clear a narrative. It is improving (obviously; it should go without saying that the ability for Americans to research the lives of Pakistanis or Guatemalans is considerably greater today than it was in a pre-internet era, but there have also been helpful legal and bureaucratic reforms), but it’s not improving at the rate of the rest of border security. It’s the most boring part of most comprehensive immigration reform proposals.
Issuing the visa and processing the immigrant at the airport is border security, both by my definitions and the US legal definitions; you’re dealing with the CBP. Tracking them down when they’re inside the country is not border security.
I think that it would be a positive idea to have more electronic tracking of immigrants, but that sort of thing really wasn’t feasible until quite recently (unless you’re talking about an ankle cuff, which I’d oppose), but even by your definition a lot of that would be internal enforcement.
I’m not sure what sort of recording you want to do at the entrance. At the moment, they take your fingerprints, photos, and such. Unless you’re a trusted regular traveler they interview you and take note of the information you’ve provided them. Before you travel, you need to provide them with information. Depending on the basis for your entry, this may include interviews, voluminous documentation, a medical exam, and such.
I’d like them to include iris scans, but I’m not sure that that makes much of a difference. Is that the sort of reform you’re concerned about my ignoring?
So far as I know, the people successfully applying for refugee status are not flouting our laws.
Could you unpack that?
You believe that there’s a border security problem with the business elite? Could you expand on that, too?
Sure. There’s a lot of commie opposition to the fence. Since they’re pretty marginal, though, I don’t see why you’d care. Border security has been strongly supported by California, New Mexico, and Arizona. It’s only Texas that came late to the game, and Texas isn’t dominated by cultural Marxists. There are people opposed to private prisons who object to the detainment facilities being expanded and such, but we still have more than we used to.
Compare it with previous recessions and you’ll see that the cumulative effect of the efforts from 1986 onwards has been tremendous.
Since the most powerful laws (the fence/ e-verify/ the major staff increases) have taken hold, we haven’t had an increase in illegal aliens from the South.
This was partly my point about immigration destined for Iowa, Illinois, and other non-border states shifting from going via California to going via Texas. Even within Texas, there’s been a shift from El Paso and other areas that are now protected by a fence to the Rio Grande Valley, the far South Eastern portion of the state, and a part of the state that hasn’t been growing fantastically well. California saw a substantial drop in the mid 1990s when the wall went up near San Diego, at which point California was doing pretty well (the dot com bubble was good to 1990s California).
James Of England– “Firstly, I don’t think that there are a million plus illegal immigrants entering a year.”
So James, what number ‘do you think’ is a good number? 500,000? 250,000?
As for the city size comparison, select a ‘good rejoicing number’-
‘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).’
According to several web searches the 90th largest city is in the 280,000 range so our rejoicing doesn’t reach above that. Still a lot of people who are here illegally. (I wonder if there are 250,000 illegal Americans in Mexico… every year what they would want done?)
And we weren’t talking about visa entry, we were talking about illegal border crossing and how much better it is.
American’s are still supporting the country as it ‘rejoices’ over the lawless people who are here and benefiting from the support. They can be lawless while we have to live by the law… or try to not pay your portion of the support and find out what happens when you don’t ‘rejoice’ enough.
We’re currently staying about level in terms of illegal immigrant population. With a little further reform, I’d expect that to fall (although that really gets into the next post). Does a net influx of zero or less not sound good to you?
You’ll note that the sentence is explicitly talking about metropolitan areas.
Right. I’m not suggesting that there aren’t bad things happening in America. Instead, I’m suggesting that we celebrate the good things that are happening.
To the extent that concern about supporting illegal immigrants is impinging on your ability to enjoy the progress made with border security, I’d recommend focusing on the degree to which support for illegal immigrants already present is costing us less with time, but, again, that’s an internal enforcement issue and not really for this post.
It needs to be pointed out that the vast majority of people who are here illegally do not illegally cross a border. They over stay visas.
James’ analysis of the situation on the border is correct. We are doing a good job, but could be doing better. We also need a visa checkout system, but this is a discussion about the border.
Also, we need to reform Social Security. I just want to be clear that in failing to address that in a post on border security, I’m not meaning to suggest that it’s not important.
And defeat Assad and ISIS. And I should get flowers for when Mrs. of England gets back here. Unlike the other stuff, failure to have the apartment ready really might preclude my celebrating other good things.
Rejoice! It’s a religious-praising title like that during the nativity of Jesus which only encourages more Donald Trump support.
I didn’t know that that was your plan…
A contrarian title like that seems to be out of touch with reality.
What’s next? The title: “Rejoice! The Middle East Situation Is More Encouraging Than Ever!”
Such problems are never solved. There are ups and downs, ebbs and flows, but one shouldn’t praise a possible anthill from the bottom of the Grand Canyon…
I’m not sure what the number of border agents has to do with anything if those agents are neutered. Those workers end up just being another government jobs program in the same way that the prison employees are supposedly one of the four major power players in California politics. Did David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani have quite different numbers of New York City policemen between 1993 and 1994? If you don’t hire the right people and force them to do the proper dangerous, confrontational jobs, you are simply wasting money.
It’s part of a general Rejoice! series I’m writing. Perhaps I overestimate how many people retain information from one post to another.
That wasn’t my plan, but I’m not particularly averse to it. I’ll argue when people defend his more absurd claims, but I don’t believe Trump to be the most malign force in either the general or primary campaigns.
Do you have anything to cite for your position? Like (and related to) the perennial contrarian position that crime is going down, or that the world is becoming peaceful, it will always seem be out of touch to those who struggle with statistics, but I believe the stats are pretty clear.
I agree that the problem of conflict in the Middle East is unlikely to be solved any time soon, although I have hope that it may eventually become solved. Previously, Western Europe was perhaps the most virulently internally violent region of the world, and the problem of interstate war there is now essentially solved. It appears to be solved in the Americas, too, for the most part.
Similarly, I’m not suggesting that the problem is solved with the border. Indeed, a part of the post was about future developments, which would not be exciting if the problem was solved now. Our ability to monitor the border is becoming ever more impressive, though, and it doesn’t seem particularly unlikely that we will solve it in a decade’s time or so. With a few more drones remote cameras, underground sensors and the like, somewhat improved tech, and such, having a visual check on every inch of the border, image recognition good enough to have an agent look at footage of anything that might be someone crossing, and a thoroughgoing ability to monitor tunnel development would mean that traffic really was restricted to crossing points. Those are constantly having their monitoring equipment upgraded, and our biometrics are getting ever better.
Internal enforcement isn’t likely to be entirely solved soon, but this might be.
For the most part, the changes under Obama have been continuations of the changes under Bush, which were instituted in response to the complaints of enforcement supporters in ’05-’07. The agents aren’t neutered. They’re empowered by the tech and the fence. They’re better supported by the judicial system than ever before. A vastly greater percentage of those caught are transferred into detention centers.
So you can look at the results in the statistics. The recidivism rate has plummeted. We have ended the increase in illegal aliens, and the number of Mexican illegal aliens has dropped.
Obviously, correltation is not causation. Nonetheless, when the inputs and the outputs suggest success, claiming failure demands that you support your argument with more than the assertion of failure.
The Border Patrol guys I’ve spent time with seemed like good people. Are you making an informed statement that they are not good people? Do you have anything to cite for that?
Happily, the fence has been tremendously successful in reducing the danger of the work, as has the increase in manpower. The more confrontational methods of gaining entry to America, staging and such, simply don’t happen these days. When you clearly can’t win a fight with the Patrol, you’re much less likely to start one. As such, the union complains about a single incident where a helicopter was shot at, without injury. There are lots of complaints about organized crime being allowed to run amok in border states, but the complaints don’t tent to be about the border crossings. We have a lot of dangerous and important work to be done, but for the most part that’s the state police’s job, with a little support from the FBI and ICE, rather than the CBP’s.
Rejoice! Barack Obama is violating the Constitution 30% less than last month.
Rejoice! The Deficit is only half what it was Obama’s first year.
You’re right. This is a fun game.
Tell that to Ramos and Compean.
Tell it to Brian Terry’s family.
The judicial system is better at processing the immigrants. I don’t know if that was actually unclear, or if you understood and were making a point.
It’s awful what happened to Brian Terry, but it doesn’t make the border patrol a particularly dangerous line of work. In 2014 about one american worker in forty three thousand dies at work every year. While the police are safer than in the past, there were still 103 who died.
I’m not sure if you’re saying that we should appreciate the efforts of our Patrolmen, in which case, sure, or that the existence of the occasional tragedy prevents the whole force from working. If the latter, I’m not sure why the Border Patrol would be so much more vulnerable to emotional issues than police forces are.