Confronting the problem of illegal Mexican migration to the U.S.

• Author: Griswold, Daniel T.
• Position: National Affairs

AMERICA'S immigration laws are colliding with reality, and reality is winning. Today, approximately 8,000,000 people live in the U.S. without legal documents, and each year the number grows by an estimated 250,000 as more enter illegally or overstay their visas. Over hall of the illegal immigrants entering and already here come from Mexico.

In February. 2001, Pres. George W. Bush and his Mexican counterpart, Vicente Fox, agreed at a conference in Guanajuato, Mexico. to work together to fix the problem. Then, on Sept. 7, 2001, after meeting for three days in Washington, Bush and Fox "renewed their commitment to forging new and realistic approaches to migration to ensure it is safe, orderly, legal, and dignified." They endorsed an immigration policy that includes "matching willing workers with willing employers; serving the social and economic needs of both countries; respecting the human dignity of all migrants, regardless of their status; recognizing the contribution migrants make to enriching both societies; [and] shared responsibility for ensuring migration takes place through safe and legal channels." However, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon four days later knocked those plans off the burner entirely. Now, more than a year after those events, the underlying reality of migration that brought the two presidents together remains fundamentally unchanged and must be addressed.

Immigration is the most-conspicuous piece of unfinished business between the U.S. and Mexico. On almost every other front, U.S.-Mexican relations have made dramatic progress in recent years, but a glaring exception to the trend is immigration policy. While the U.S. government has encouraged closer trade, investment, and political ties with Mexico, it has labored in vain to keep a lid on the flow of labor across the border. Since the mid 1980s, in its effort to stop illegal immigration, Washington has imposed new and burdensome regulations on American employers and dramatically increased spending on border control. Despite those aggressive efforts, America's border policy has failed to achieve its principal objective--to stem the flow of undocumented workers into the U.S. labor market.

The U.S. and Mexico share a 2,000-mile land border, by far the longest in the world between an industrialized and less-developed country. By the early 1980s, the perception became widespread that America was being flooded with illegal immigrants from Mexico. In 1986, Congress passed the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which contained three major provisions aimed at regaining "control of our borders." To dampen demand for undocumented labor, it required U.S. companies to check documentation of all prospective employees and, for the first time in American history, authorized fines against firms that knowingly hire illegal immigrants. To cut off the supply of unauthorized workers, it increased spending on the Border Patrol. Moreover, to address the issue of the millions of illegal aliens already in the U.S., it granted permanent legal status, or "amnesty," to 2,800,000 unauthorized immigrants who had been in the country continuously since Jan. 1, 1982.

After initial declines, the number of Mexicans entering the U.S. began to rise again by the early 1990s. Soon after taking office in 1993, the Clinton Administration tried to stem the rising tide through enhanced border enforcement in a policy it dubbed "prevention through deterrence." The policy focused on the major entry points along the U.S.-Mexican border: San Diego, Calif.; El Paso and Laredo, Tex.; and Nogales, Ariz. The 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act further ramped up resources for border control, including funds for additional layers of fencing in San Diego, and imposed tougher penalties on smugglers, undocumented workers, and those who overstay their visas. From 1986 to 1998, the amount of tax dollars that Congress appropriated for the Immigration and Naturalization Service increased eightfold and for the Border Patrol sixfold. The number of Border Patrol agents assigned to the southwestern border doubled to 8,500.

By any real measure of results, the effort since 1986 to constrict illegal immigration has failed. The number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has doubled since then, from an estimated 4,000,000 to 8,000,000. The length of the U.S.-Mexican border and the volume of legal border crossings virtually guarantee that current American border control policy will fail. Moreover, Washington's expensive and coercive efforts to curb Mexican migration have caused a number of perverse and unintended consequences.

Why Mexicans migrate north

To understand why U.S. border policy has failed, we must first understand why Mexican workers migrate despite the American government's expensive campaign to keep them out. Most Mexicans who migrate to the U.S. do not come intending to settle permanently. They come to solve temporary problems of family...