What Border Crisis?

Annual Border Patrol Apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico Border, FY 1970 – FY 2020

 

Figure 1 from  "Rising Border Encounters in 2021"

On June 24 the American Immigration Council released an updated version of its indispensable fact sheet on this year’s border encounters. Like the previous versions, this one demonstrates that there actually isn’t a “border crisis”—at least not the one that the right wing and much of media have been hyping for the past five months.

 

Of course there are real crises at the border: the after-effects of the previous administration’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, the present administration’s maintenance of Trump’s expulsions under Title 42 of the health code, and the continuing failures, despite some improvements, to provide acceptable treatment to minors who have crossed the border. But the crisis of hundreds of thousands of foreigners rushing across an “open border” is simply a fiction.

 

The statistics do show that more immigrants are being encountered (or apprehended) by the Border Patrol than at any other time in fifteen years. But the fact of more encounters doesn’t necessarily mean more migrants are successfully entering the country.

 

The Border Crossings Have Declined…

The “border crisis” narrative ignores differences in the types of encounter, and in the types of people crossing the border. The Council’s fact sheet carefully breaks down these differences.

 

“For nearly a 35-year period beginning in the mid-1970s, the Border Patrol routinely apprehended at least 1,000,000 migrants a year,” the fact sheet notes. A still greater number of migrants succeeded in entering the country without authorization. For example, in fiscal year (FY) 2000 the Border Patrol reported 1.7 million apprehensions, but the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) “estimates that there were an additional 2.1 million successful unlawful entries.”

 

The situation changed rapidly as the number of Border Patrol agents increased—from “11,264 in FY 2005 to 21,444 in FY 2011.” The result was that by fiscal 2012 DHS estimated that for the first time, more border crossers were apprehended than succeeded in entering. Moreover, by then the Great Recession and changing conditions in Mexico had reduced the number of Mexicans seeking work here: “migration from Mexico declined sharply, falling from 1,089,092 apprehensions in FY 2006 to 340,252 apprehensions in FY 2011.”

 

But 2014 brought a new phenomenon, an increase in migrants seeking asylum or arriving as unaccompanied minors. U.S. law has special provisions for asylum seekers, along with unaccompanied minors from countries other than Canada and Mexico. These migrants usually turn themselves in to the Border Patrol; they know that if they pass an initial screening for “credible fear,” they will allowed to remain in the United States temporarily to pursue their cases.

 

There have been a number of spikes in border crossings by these migrants—in 2014, 2016, 2019, and this year. Each of these spikes was treated as a “border crisis” by the media, although none approached the level of unauthorized entry in the years before the Great Recession.

 

…But Border Encounters Have Increased

Asylum seekers and unaccompanied minors aren’t the majority of the border crossers this year, however. What about the other border crossers?

 

One reason this group has grown large is the Biden administration’s continued use of Title 42 to push migrants back from the border without detaining and processing them. “In the first four full months of the Biden administration, 65.4% of all people encountered by the Border Patrol at the border were expelled under Title 42,” the Council notes. As a result, a migrant who has been pushed back can simply try again. For example, 38 percent of the migrants encountered in May had attempted to enter previously within this fiscal year.

 

Each of the migrant’s attempted crossings can result in encountering a Border Patrol agent, and this is then reported as a new border encounter—even though the migrant may never have succeeded in entering the United States.

 

Individuals Apprehended by the Border Patrol and Not Expelled, 10/12 – 5/21

Figure 4 from "Rising Border Encounters in 2021"

This results in border encounter statistics that only reflect attempts to enter this country, not actual entries. In fact, unauthorized entry has remained relatively low—significantly lower than it was fifteen years ago. As the Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted in a June 14 tweet, the number of migrants who get across the border without being apprehended is probably about five times lower than the number in 2006.

 

If the current situation is a border crisis, then the United States has been experiencing a border crisis at least since the 1970s, under eight different administrations.

Hey VP Harris, Here Is a Progressive Way to Address the Root Causes of Migration

VP Harris meets with Guatemalan officials. Photo: Kent Nishimura/LAT/Getty Images

This isn’t to say that progressives should view their program as primarily an answer to the supposed “border crisis.” After all, there’s no reason to fear migration.... But the occasional spikes in border crossings give progressives an opportunity to go on the offensive, to describe the ways that their program would improve the lives of working people both at home and abroad.

By David L. Wilson, Truthout

June 13, 2021

The recent focus on the rising number of Central American asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border could have one positive result: it creates an opening that activists can use to promote a progressive foreign and domestic agenda.

 

The two parties are split over how to slow the current rise in migration. Republicans favor the sort of harsh measures that the Trump administration inflicted on migrants; centrist Democrats also support deterrence, but they propose moderating it slightly and spending a few billion dollars to address Central American migration’s root causes. Vice President Kamala Harris’s statements during her June 7-8 trip to Guatemala and Mexico were typical.[…]

 

Read the full article:

https://truthout.org/articles/hey-kamala-here-is-a-progressive-way-to-address-the-root-causes-of-migration/

Biden Has Restarted the Central American Minors Program. Will That Help?

On March 10 the U.S. State Department announced officially that it was restarting the Obama administration’s Central American Minors (CAM) program, a process for Central American youths to seek refugee status from within their own countries instead of having to travel across Mexico to the U.S. border.

CAM will definitely benefit a certain number of Central Americans, but it will do little for most of the tens of thousands of Central Americans now seeking asylum from dangers in their countries.

The Obama administration announced the earlier CAM program in the fall of 2014. The proposal sparked wild accusations from the right wing about “a dangerous situation” and “[p]otentially millions” of Central American youths being flown into the United States “with taxpayer dollars.” In reality, as we warned at the time, the program could only help a limited number.

The program, we noted, was

only open to immigrant parents from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras who are “lawfully present” in the United States. They may be legal permanent residents (LPRs), for example, or be covered by temporary protected status (TPS), or they may have had their deportations deferred.

Applicants also had to go through a time-consuming vetting process while remaining in their home country, which ruled out people in immediate danger. And since CAM was administered through the refugee program, the number of minors accepted was restricted by the administration’s proposed ceilings for refugees. In 2015 the ceiling was 4,000 for all of Latin America, and most of the slots were already allocated to Cubans.

How Did the First CAM Turn Out?

As we predicted, relatively few Central American minors were admitted into the United States through the program, which ran for less than two years before being shut down by the Trump White House.

No, CAM didn't bring millions of youths to the U.S.

A total of 2,631 Central American minors ended up being settled here as refugees, we learned in February from a spokesperson for the State Department, which managed the program. Some other minors were admitted to the United States temporarily in a parole program administered by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; these parolees would be able to seek permanent status from within the country through other channels. (Presumably this would include such avenues as protection under the Convention Against Torture.) According to information provided by USCIS spokesperson Victoria Palmer, about 2,400 of these parolees had entered the country by last December; it’s not clear how many have had their cases resolved.*

So how many Central American minors will actually benefit from the resurrected CAM program?

The limitations on the original program still apply with the revived program. The new refugee ceilings the government announced on May 3 are somewhat higher than those for 2015, with a total of 5,000 slots allocated for Latin America and the Caribbean, an increase of 1,000; in addition, Cubans no longer have the priority they had in 2015. So the number of minors granted refugee status or paroled into the country each year will probably be higher than under the Obama administration, but it will remain in the low thousands.

In short, restarting the CAM program will save a number of youths from danger in Central America. This is laudable, but it certainly won’t be enough to stop tens of thousands of Central Americans from fleeing north to escape intolerable conditions at home.

* USCIS’s Palmer told us that approximately 1,450 applicants were paroled into the U.S. before the program was terminated in August 2017. She also provided a copy of a quarterly court status report for S.A. et al v. Trump, the suit challenging the program’s termination. The report, filed Dec. 30, 2020, showed that another 950 minors had been paroled into that country by that date.