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.