Battlefield: El Paso.

• Author: Massey, Douglas S.
• Position: Illegal immigrants entering the United States - El Paso, Texas

It is commonly accepted that the United States was "invaded" by an unprecedented wave of illegal immigrants beginning in the 1980s. According to the Department of Homeland Security, by 2008 there were 11.6 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, 61 percent from Mexico. The next-closest source was El Salvador, at just 5 percent. Hence the "invasion" was framed as a Mexican issue, with pundits from Lou Dobbs to Patrick Buchanan warning of dire consequences for America if it was not checked, by force if necessary.

The only problem with the invasion is that it never happened. The U.S.-Mexico border is not now and has never been out of control. From 1950 to the present, the total number of migrants entering the United States from Mexico has varied very little. There has certainly been no massive upsurge. What changed were the auspices under which Mexicans entered the country, their place of entry, their ultimate U.S. destination and their tendency to remain here rather than return home. Workers previously labeled immigrants became illegals. The border was fortified. States with high immigrant populations cracked down. Walls were built. Immigration turned into a militarized policy issue. And since it became increasingly risky for Mexicans to cross the border, once here, they remained. All these changes are a consequence of our own misguided immigration and border policies.

The foregoing assertions may seem outlandish given the prevailing wisdom, but there is no arguing with the numbers. (1) U.S. policy has in many ways created our immigrant problem. During the 1950s, the United States took in hundreds of thousands of Mexican migrants each year. Most entered as temporary workers under the Bracero Program, a bilateral agreement with Mexico in force from 1942 through 1964. In the late 1950s the inflow of temporary Mexican workers was on the order of 450,000 per year. At the same time, there was no statutory limit on legal immigration from Mexico and around 43,000 Mexicans settled each year as permanent residents. Given ample options for legal entry, illegal migration was nonexistent.

All this changed in 1965. Though in fact the total number of Mexicans entering the States was declining, new U.S. policies reclassified Mexicans as illegals. This changed America's entire sense of immigration. Against Mexican protests, the United States unilaterally shut down the Bracero Program and passed amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act that set limits on immigration from the Western Hemisphere. A hemisphere-wide cap of 120,000 visas took effect in 1968, and in 1976 Mexico was placed under a country-specific quota of 20,000 legal immigrants per year. The conditions of labor demand in the United States did not change, however, and in the absence of legal avenues for entry, that demand was met by what was now illegal migration. Although Congress reauthorized a temporary-worker program in 1976, it was limited to a few thousand visas per year. By 1986, the net inflow of new undocumented migrants had skyrocketed, rising to around 230,000 per year from essentially none three decades earlier. When including those on temporary visas and with permanent legal residency, the total number of Mexicans entering the United States was now around 300,000. Even though this was well below the nearly half a million who entered each year during the 1950s, the framing of migrants as "illegal" imbued the issue with an entirely different sensibility. The seeds for our future immigration battles were thus sown.

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The authority to undertake the enforcement of caps had come at a political price. While we were making an illegal-immigration problem out of whole cloth, we were simultaneously creating an "upsurge" in Mexican permanent residents. Pressured by immigrant and employer lobbies, the government added two legalization programs to the caps in the 1980s: an amnesty for undocumented migrants who could demonstrate five years of U.S. residence, and a special legalization for farm workers who were employed during the 1985-86 growing season. Ultimately, 2.3 million Mexicans came forward and received temporary legal status--the first real expansion in legal migration since 1965--creating exactly the problem the policies hoped to avoid. When these migrants became...