Arrests at the US-Mexican border continue to drop

ALICIA A. CALDWELL

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Arrests of ille­gal immi­grants along the U.S. bor­der with Mex­ico are at the low­est level since the Nixon admin­is­tra­tion, indi­cat­ing that fewer peo­ple are attempt­ing to cross the bor­der to live or work in the United States. The devel­op­ment could change the debate on ille­gal immi­gra­tion from secur­ing the bor­der to han­dling the peo­ple who are already here.

It’s the sixth straight year appre­hen­sions have dropped.

“Increas­ingly the prob­lem is the 11 mil­lion peo­ple (in the coun­try ille­gally), rather than the bor­der itself,” said Demetrios Papademetriou, pres­i­dent of the Migra­tion Pol­icy Insti­tute, a non-partisan research organization.

In the fis­cal year that ended Sept. 30, Bor­der Patrol arrested 327,577 peo­ple try­ing to cross the south­ern U.S. bor­der. Mean­while, Immi­gra­tion and Cus­toms Enforce­ment offi­cials deported a record 396,906 peo­ple over the same period. That marks the first time in decades that for­mal removals from the U.S. out­paced arrests at the border.

The num­ber of arrests of peo­ple try­ing to sneak across the bor­der has been steadily declin­ing since 2006, after an all-time high of more than 1.6 mil­lion appre­hen­sions in 2000. Dur­ing those 10 years, more immi­grants have become set­tled res­i­dents of the U.S.

Accord­ing to the Pew His­panic Cen­ter, nearly two-thirds of the country’s esti­mated 10.2 mil­lion adult ille­gal immi­grants have been liv­ing in the United States for at least 10 years. A decade ago, fewer than half had been in the U.S. that long.

“This is all part of a larger pic­ture that we’re not see­ing very many new undoc­u­mented immi­grants com­ing in, so the share of new undoc­u­mented immi­grants is smaller,” said Jef­frey Pas­sel, senior demog­ra­pher at the Pew His­panic Cen­ter. “A lot of peo­ple are stay­ing. They’ve put down roots. There clearly hasn’t been a large scale depar­ture of peo­ple who have been here a while.”

But politi­cians are still fight­ing over who is best equipped to secure the border.

Attempts to pass immi­gra­tion reform leg­is­la­tion have repeat­edly failed, with Repub­li­cans say­ing they will not sup­port any bill that pro­vides a path to legal­iza­tion for ille­gal immi­grants who are here and won’t con­sider other reforms until the bor­der is secure.

Some Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates, includ­ing for­mer House Speaker Newt Gin­grich, have signed a pledge to build a fence along the length of the south­ern bor­der — there is already more than 600 miles (965 kilo­me­ters) of tow­er­ing steel fenc­ing in place. Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who does not sup­port a bor­der fence, has pro­posed adding to the 1,200 National Guard troops cur­rently sta­tioned along the bor­der in a sup­port role. Perry and Gin­grich have both spo­ken of the need for “human­ity” in deal­ing with ille­gal immi­grants who are already here, and were both crit­i­cized by con­ser­v­a­tive Republicans.

Home­land Secu­rity Sec­re­tary Janet Napoli­tano has said the bor­der is more secure than ever before “and it is clear from every mea­sure we cur­rently have that this approach is working.”

But the weak U.S. econ­omy and tough new immi­gra­tion laws in states such as Alabama and Ari­zona likely play as much of a role in the drop in ille­gal cross­ings as increased secu­rity efforts, said Doris Meiss­ner, for­mer head of the Immi­gra­tion and Nat­u­ral­iza­tion Ser­vice and a senior fel­low at the Migra­tion Pol­icy Institute.

“There is no sin­gle thing we can point to,” Meiss­ner said. “I think it’s per­fectly legit­i­mate to say that bor­der secu­rity is work­ing. But it is not legit­i­mate to say they are entirely respon­si­ble. Obvi­ously it’s a com­bi­na­tion of the econ­omy and enforcement.”

It is likely that bor­der secu­rity will remain a divi­sive polit­i­cal issue, par­tic­u­larly in the 2012 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, Papademetriou and oth­ers said.

Posted by AP News on Dec 6 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.