Now we can return to our
original questions: does this year’s increase in border apprehensions mean that
more undocumented migrants are settling here? Is it comparable to the border
crossings in years like 2000?
Encounters and Admissions
On October 22 Customs and Border
Enforcement (CBP) released fiscal 2021’s final number for migrants apprehended or expelled at the southwestern border:
1,734,686. This breaks down into 75,480 arriving at ports of entry and 1,659,206
crossing the border between ports of entry. The number is historically high, surpassing
the 1,643,679 apprehended at that border in 2000. Still, there’s no reason to
think that 1,734,686 migrants have been added to the U.S. undocumented
population.
In fact, 1,063,526 of the
migrants were immediately expelled under Title 42 of the U.S. health code, and
another 128,851 were sent back through expedited removal, reinstatement of removal,
voluntary return, or the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP).
This leaves 542,309 border
crossers admitted to the country, but the actual number is probably lower:
47,671 of these migrants still didn’t have a final disposition when CBP
collected the data at the end of September, so some had probably been deported.
The migrants admitted were almost all members of family units or as minors
without their parents who were allowed to seek asylum: a total of
479,728 family unit members and 149,033 children without their parents were
apprehended at the border. Note that seeking asylum is specifically protected
by U.S. law,
so it’s inaccurate to refer to asylum seekers’ entry as “illegal.”
Many thousands of the 542,309
migrants admitted to the country are undoubtedly now in immigration detention.
The government doesn’t seem to have made the number available at this time.
The “Gotaways” and
Overstays
There’s also a certain
number of migrants who entered by crossing the border without being
apprehended.
In Part 3 we estimated that
the current apprehension rate was something like 80 percent. Applying this rate
to the 1,659,206 migrants encountered at the border, we estimate that 414,802
migrants may have crossed the border without being apprehended, more than double
the estimated numbers in 2016. But CBP seems to have a lower estimate: three
anonymous CBP officials told the Washington Post in April that about 1,000 were crossing each day
without being apprehended—which would come to 365,000 for the fiscal year.
Depending on how we count
these “gotaways,” the total number of migrants joining the undocumented
population through the southwestern border would be at most between 907,309
and 957,111.
But not all undocumented
immigrants enter through the border. In Part 2 we cited estimates that as many
as 66 percent of the new arrivals in 2016 were overstays. But this year’s
number of overstays can’t be anything like the 306,000 to 320,000 we calculated
for 2016.
Just as the pandemic has
undoubtedly disrupted other migration patterns, it has dramatically changed the
number of possible overstays. The US government has restricted travel from the
areas that provided the most visitors in the past—China, the Schengen zone, the
UK, India, Brazil—while much land entry from Mexico and Canada is also
restricted. The result, according to 2021 policy brief from the American Immigration Lawyers Association
(AILA), is an 80 percent drop in the number of visitors with non-immigrant
visas.
Applying
the reduction in visas to the number of overstays from 2016, we get an estimate
of just 61,000 or 62,000 overstays for all of fiscal 2021. But this is probably
an underestimate, since more than 200,000 of the visas were presumably for H-2A
temporary farmworkers; these are largely Mexicans, who have a high rate of
overstays. To compensate for this, we round the overstays up to 120,000.
The Final Numbers
If we add overstays to the
projected successful border crossers through September, we get between 1,127,309
and 1,177,111 migrants entering the undocumented population this fiscal year.
This is definitely higher
than the unauthorized entries in recent years 2016, but still in line with the entries
in each year from 1994 to 2006, and despite the media’s comparisons to 2000,
below the estimated 1,389,322 entries for that year. As Princeton sociologist
Douglas Massey, an expert on immigration patterns, noted earlier this year, the current increase could be a return to the
pattern that characterized most of the last five decades, or it may show the
effects of the COVID pandemic, which created economic hardships pushing more
Mexican workers to cross the border and more people coming from relatively
distant countries to seek asylum.
And we don’t yet know how
the pandemic may have affected the number of migrants leaving the undocumented
population. CMS’s estimate for 2016 was 771,000. If that number left this year,
the total increase in the undocumented population would be less than 500,000.
In other words, despite
ominous warnings about “illegal aliens” and a “border crisis,” this year’s the rate of unauthorized entry is
probably less than it was in the early 2000s and may just represent a temporary
effect of the global pandemic.
Part 1: http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/2021/08/whats-relation-between-border.html
Part 2: http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/2021/08/whats-relation-between-border_24.html
Part 3: http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/2021/08/whats-relation-between-border_26.html
