Immigration and border control.

• Author: Alden, Edward

For the past two decades the United States, a country with a strong tradition of limited government, has been pursuing a widely popular initiative that requires one of the most ambitious expansions of government power in modern history: securing the nation's borders against illegal immigration. Congress and successive administrations--both Democratic and Republican--have increased the size of the Border Patrol from fewer than 3,000 agents to more than 21,000, built nearly 700 miles of fencing along the southern border with Mexico, and deployed pilotless drones, sensor cameras, and other expensive technologies aimed at preventing illegal crossings at the land borders. The government has overhauled the visa system to require interviews for all new visa applicants and instituted extensive background checks for many of those wishing to come to the United States to study, travel, visit family, or do business. It now requires secure documents--a passport or the equivalent--for all travel to and from the United States by citizens and noncitizens. And border officers take fingerprints and run other screening measures on all travelers coming to this country by air in order to identify criminals, terrorists, or others deemed to pose a threat to the United States.

The goal is to create a border control system that ensures that only those legally permitted by the government to enter the territory of the United States will be able to do so, and that they will leave the country when required. The ambition of such an undertaking is little appreciated. For most of its history, the United States had only the loosest sort of border controls. Scrutiny of most visa applicants was cursory; few checks were done on incoming airline passengers; and it was possible to walk freely across almost any portion of the more than 7,500 miles of land borders with Mexico or Canada (Alden 2008).

That began to change gradually in the 1980s with the increase in illegal immigration from Mexico, and then more rapidly in the early 1990s following a political outcry from U.S. border states, especially California. The border control effort was greatly accelerated after the 9/11 attacks, becoming the primary mission of the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) created in 2003. Yet some two decades along, border control remains a work in progress. Most Americans remain unconvinced that border security is improving; a Rasmussen poll taken in May 2011 found that two-thirds of the public believe the border with Mexico is not secure. While budget constraints will slow the extraordinarily rapid growth of border enforcement, the Obama administration and Congress are determined to continue tightening border control and further reducing illegal entries.

An in-depth stocktaking of the costs and benefits of this effort to date is long overdue. But at least three interim conclusions can be reached.

First, the U.S. borders are far harder to cross illegally than at any time in American history, and the number of people entering illegally has dropped sharply. Evading border enforcement has become more difficult, more expensive, and more uncertain than ever before. But border control will always remain imperfect; it is not possible for the United States to create a perfectly secure border, and that should not be the goal.

Second, more people still wish to come to the United States-even in a weak economy with high unemployment--than are permitted by current legal immigration and work visa quotas. One consequence is an expanding organized crime problem in which increasingly sophisticated criminal networks earn high returns for helping illegal immigrants enter the United States. This has contributed to a growing sense of insecurity along the borders even as illegal entry has become more difficult. The only way to remedy this is through legal programs that hew more closely to labor market demand.

Third, increased border control efforts have not just discouraged illegal border crossers, but legal travelers as well. Tourism, business travel, crossings at the land borders, and other legal entries into the United States have all been flat or falling over the past decade. Skilled immigrants have been discouraged and sought out more hospitable countries. The economic costs of these declines have never been measured in any comprehensive way, but they are certainly large.

The questions for Congress and the Obama administration in the near future ought to be these: What are the goals of border control? How much is enough? How much can we afford? How can the economic costs of tighter border enforcement best be mitigated? How can better legal immigration and temporary work programs help to reduce further the illegal migration problem? Unfortunately, in the current political environment such questions are not being asked. Instead, Congress and the administration continue to be focused on the elusive goal of creating a perfectly secure border through enforcement measures alone.

A Brief History of U.S. Border Control

Immigration has been the forgotten stepchild of the second era of globalization. The United States over the past half century consciously and deliberately freed up trade in goods, lifted controls on capital and investment,

and urged and pressured other countries to do the same. Its immigration policy, however--the third leg of freer movement of people to accompany the freer movement of goods and capital--developed largely by accident. Legal immigration levels rose sharply beginning in the late 1970s, largely as an unanticipated consequence of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that allowed permanent residents and naturalized citizens to petition for family members to join them. The Immigration Act of 1990 added larger quotas as well for skilled immigrants with no family ties. The United States also tacitly accepted high levels of illegal immigration, whether Mexicans and Central Americans coming across the southwest land border or Chinese, Pakistanis, and Filipinos arriving by air and overstaying tourist or student visas. While there was constant grumbling about the problem of unauthorized immigration, especially from the border states, the pressure to do something about the problem was outweighed by economic interests that opposed the sort of the heavy-handed government intervention that would be required to gain greater control. The landmark 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which continues to loom over the immigration debate today, coupled legalization for nearly 3 million unauthorized immigrants with a largely unmet promise of better border security and workplace enforcement to discourage additional illegal immigration.

The result of this non-policy and non-enforcement of existing laws was a system that worked rather well from an economic perspective. Many young Mexican or Central American men would come on a seasonal or temporary basis to fill jobs in agriculture, tourism, construction, and other sectors. The numbers would rise in a strong economy and fall in weaker one, responding effectively to U.S. economic cycles. And given the few legal options available for low-skilled workers, as Gordon Hanson has written, illegal immigration was "'the most viable means of entering the country" (Hanson 2007: 14). The few interventions by Congress were generally positive, such as the creation in 1990 of the H1-B visa to permit some of the increasing number of skilled foreign students at U.S. universities to remain and work in the United States.

But the arrangement could not survive two external shocks. The first was the surge in illegal immigration, driven primarily by a demographic bulge of young people in Mexico, successive Mexican economic crises in the 1980s and 1990s that slowed economic growth and limited job opportunities at home, and the restructuring triggered by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), especially in the Mexican agriculture sector. Attempted illegal entries, as measured by the number of Border Patrol apprehensions, grew from negligible levels in the 1960s to more than 1 million annually during the 1980s and close to 2 million annually by the end of the 1990s. (1) Illegal migration went from being a nuisance problem to a major issue of public security and state welfare in the border states of California and Texas (and only later in Arizona). The first big buildup of armed agents at the southern border, with Operation Gatekeeper in San Diego and Operation Hold the Line in E1 Paso, fundamentally changed the economic dynamics of the border. As border crossing became more difficult and expensive, more migrants opted to settle in the United States, often bringing spouses and...