Some Facts About Our Southwest Border
The sad irony about much of the public discourse on immigration is that their is often a complete disconnect between people’s heated opinions and actual facts. Moreover, when any segment of our economy suffers, immigrants are often unjustly blamed. Fact deficient reasoning and vitriolic opinions based on fiction are on the rise, led by the master “fact-ignorer” of recent time (he who will not be named in this blog – no more free publicity).
Before I come off my rails, let’s turn to the point of this blog. DHS (the Department of Homeland Security – the agency actually in charge of immigration enforcement) released its annual statistics for 2016 regarding our Southern border. Below are some highlights of this data:
- Total apprehensions were slightly up from 2015, at 408,870; however this number is still vastly smaller than the number of apprehensions from the 1980s – 2008. Apprehensions are an indicator of total number of attempts to cross the border. Because it has become increasingly difficult to avoid detection, the number of apprehensions should reflect a greater number of total attempts than this number did historically.
- Far fewer Mexicans are crossing, instead being outnumbered by Central Americans fleeing intense gang violence and poverty in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua and Honduras.
- The biggest rise is in unaccompanied children and families from Central America. In 2016, 60,000 unaccompanied CHILDREN crossed the border. Take a step back and think about that. Imagine sending your child on a incredibly dangerous and difficult journey through some of the most dangerous countries in the world ALONE. Why would you do that? There is only one answer, desperation, fear that your child will not survive if they do not make that journey. This is the biggest rise in crossings on our Southern border. How can you turn that statistic into hate or vitriol or even lack of sympathy for immigrants? OK, back on the rails for a little longer.
- Secretary Johnson talks about work to mitigate this refugee crisis, including greater investment in the region and working with more stable countries like Costa Rica to assist with the crisis.
- DHS continues to do a better job at focusing deportation resources on criminal foreign nationals, or others that fit into DHS deportation priorities.
So, in contrast to so much misinformation, our immigration system is not crumbling around us. Instead, unlawful immigration continues to be historically quite low, enforcement continues to improve, and the only notable segment increases in border crossings are from children, families (and most recently Haitians) that are fleeing a real refugee or humanitarian crisis.