What came first, illegal immigration or the wall?
The US-Mexico border is the most militarized border in the world.
There is over 700 miles of fencing patrolled by 20,000 border patrol agents. Each year American
taxpayers spend over 4.8 billion dollars on Border Patrol and another 8.4 billion on Immigration and
Customs Enforcement. Is our southern border really worth all of the taxes we pour into it?
Hello, I’m Dr. Douglas Massey, I’m a Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton
University and the past-president of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. I’ve
spent my career studying unauthorized immigration and the United States border.
What many Americans might not realize is just how new all of this border security is. In the
early years of our republic there was no firm border line, only a fuzzy western "frontier."
As the frontier pushed westward, the border between America and its neighbors continued to be
blurred. When the southern border was finalized in the mid 1800s, it was soft and porous,
an invisible line on a map that ran through the middle of towns and even houses
In the early 1900s, labor shortages led many American farmers to begin recruiting
fieldworkers from Mexico. The work was seasonal though, with workers coming from Mexico for the
planting and harvest, and then returning to Mexico for the off seasons. The US government
actually encouraged this migration through a temporary labor program which helped farmers
recruit legal workers from Mexico. Because they only stayed for the harvest,
Mexican workers were not considered immigrants and weren’t included in early immigration laws that
put quota limits on other nations. The US Border Patrol was established in 1924, not to prevent
the entry of Mexicans but to catch Europeans trying to get around quotas at Ellis Island.
During the Second World War, the U.S. government once again helped farmers recruit workers
from Mexico. The Bracero Program was created in 1942 and steadily expanded after the war. By the
late 1950s, it was recruiting around 450,000 Mexicans per year for temporary farm labor in
the United States; and each year another 50,000 or so entered as legal permanent immigrants.
Everything changed in 1965 when the Bracero program was ended
and a numerical limit on Mexican immigration was imposed for the first time. Almost overnight,
Mexico went from having access to around half a million legal visas, to less than 20,000.
But the demand for agriculture labor didn’t go away, and what was now “unauthorized” or
“illegal” migration rose to fill the gap left by the end of the Bracero Program.
Border apprehensions went from 40,000 a year in 1965 to over 1.6 million in 1986.
However, these were still seasonal workers, and the flow was still circular,
with 86% of undocumented workers returning home at the end of each harvest season.
In practical terms, little had changed in the Mexican-American migration
system. The same workers were coming in the same numbers to the same U.S. farms in the
same states and returning to their homes in Mexico at the same time each year. In symbolic
terms though, much had changed, for now the majority of migrants were "illegal"
and thus by definition considered "criminals" and "lawbreakers." While the demand for seasonal
agricultural work stayed the same, what the government did was criminalize its workers.
Reacting to this perceived change, the US government began pouring more
and more money and resources into Border Patrol. From 1986 to 2010, the number of uniformed Border
Patrol officers increased 5.6 times, the agency's budget grew by a factor of 17,
and hundreds of miles of walls and fencing were constructed near major ports of entry.
None of this extra border security though did anything to stop border crossings. During the 70s
and 80s the odds of a migrant being apprehended while crossing the border was about one in three.
As more resources were poured into Border Patrol, migrants began crossing in more remote parts
of the border and the odds of a migrant being apprehended actually went down for a time.
The diversion of border crossings into remote areas lowered the odds of apprehension,
but it also increased the risk of injury and death, for in addition to being less
populated and less patrolled, these desolate areas were also more dangerous. Between 1993
and 2010, the number of deaths along the border skyrocketed, increasing more than five times.
Criminalizing border crossing also made it more… criminal. “Coyotes” and other smugglers moved in
to capitalize on the new black market and border crossing became more expensive.
In the two decades after 1993, the cost of hiring a Coyote
increased by a factor of 4.6 in real terms. But the biggest impact of increased border
security was that for the first time in the history of Mexican-American migration,
the movement of migrants stopped being circular. Finding it increasingly difficult, dangerous,
and expensive to move back and forth for seasonal work, migrants began staying in America during the
off seasons. As men stayed longer north of the border, they were increasingly joined by wives
and children, transitioning from seasonal migrants to permanent immigrants.
In other words, the unintended effect of restrictive immigration and border policies was
the creation of the undocumented population as we know it today. Removing the Bracero Program made a
traditional, migratory economic system illegal . Building walls on the southern border didn’t
keep people out, but rather trapped them in. Since 2007, the number of Undocumented immigrants
in America had actually decreased, not because of the efforts of Border Patrol or ICE, but
rather because of an unrelated shift in Mexican migration patterns.
In the last 13 years, more people have moved from the U.S. to Mexico than from Mexico to the U.S.
This shift was started by the 2008 Recession, but has been continued by a change in Mexico’s age
demographics. People tend to migrate when they are younger, if they do not move before the age of 30,
they are unlikely to do so later in life. In the last 50 years, Mexico’s fertility rate
has dropped from 7.2 to 2.1 and the median age of the Mexican population has gone from 16.7
to 29.3. Mexico has become an aging country New undocumented immigrants in recent years have
come not from Mexico, but from other countries. Today, most undocumented immigrants enter the
United States legally. They come with papers. They enter as tourists and overstay their visas.
Border security doesn’t affect them. And yet still, to this day, there are calls to increase
border patrol staffing, to build more barriers, to “strengthen our border defense.” Why?
No matter which way you stand on the issue, there are better ways to address undocumented
immigration than a largely symbolic, totally ineffective, and extremely expensive border wall.