Tag: immigration

Post #2022: 13,000 murderers … something something something … illegal immigrants? It’s our theme for the coming week.

 

Today there’s a big splash in the news, that (something-something-something) illegal immigrants have 13,000 convicted of homicide among them.  This, based on what Rep. Gonzales posted on Twitter.  You can see images of the original ICE letter.

That immediately struck me as odd.  Number-wise.  Very odd.  For a few reasons.

First, that’s a lot.

The population that is drawn from is the roughly 7 million cases on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement “non-detained docket”.  That is, persons pending (in effect) their deportation trial or hearing, that are not being held in custody, but instead have been sent out into the community while they await trial.

So, rough cut, that 13,000 works out to a rate of about 185/100,000 population.  Where the population at issue is illegal immigrants who have are living in the community while awaiting their deportation trial.

Compare that to the annual homicide rate in the U.S., which works out to be about 6/100,000.  Even then, only about half of homicide cases are ever resolved (i.e., somebody is convicted).  So the number of persons convicted of homicide in the U.S. works out to be about 3/100,000.  Restrict that to adults, and you could stretch that to 4/100,000 adults per year.

So the apparent rate of homicide conviction (or maybe just being accused of homicide) in this docket population appears to be about 50 times higher than I would have expected.

But …

Multiply by 3 for the high Latin America homicide rate.  Homicide rates are higher in the countries that account for the bulk of souther-border immigration.  So, where the U.S. runs about 6/100,000, the median for Latin America appears to be about 3 times that amount (per eyeballing Wikipedia).

Multiply by (say) 10 for the fact that this ICE number is lifetime history of having been charged with or convicted of homicide.  The U.S. homicide statistics were per year, an annual rate.  The ICE figure isn’t an annual rate.  It’s “any history of” conviction or pending charges for homicide.  But this is something akin to “ever been convicted or or charged with a homicide”, over their prior lifetime.  A fudge factor of 10 years seems at least plausible, given the ridiculously large fraction of the U.S. population that has “a criminal record”, as opposed to persons charged in any one year (reference).

And at that point, the number starts to make sense.  Those two adjustments:

  • For the higher violent crime rate in typical countries of origin.
  • For “any criminal record” versus “convicted last year”.

And those two factors take you from 3/100,000/year homicide convictions in the U.S., to an expected value of about (3 x 3 x 10 = ) to an expected rate of 90/100,000 with any history of homicide within a relatively young, mostly Latin-American population.

So, just assuming these are average Latin Americans, and that ICE has (belated) access their full criminal history, the ICE figures now begin to make sense.  Just those two adjustments put you in the ballpark of their 13,000 murderers (180/100,000).

But “ICE Docket” is a wild card.

What’s a docket?  That’s a list of pending ICE court cases.  Where those cases are about whether or not to deport the person.

Now it all comes together.  I think.  Here’s my guess as to what’s going on.

First, as the original letter makes clear, if the ICE knows that an illegal immigrant in their custody has a history of serious crime, they do not let go of that person.  For sure, convicted of murder would qualify. So this 13,000 is people that the ICE found out about, after-the-fact.  How many were kept in detention, and so did not end up on this “docket”, is not known.

That factor, by itself, should have depressed the overall rate, and so does not explain why the observed rate is about twice what you would reasonably expect.

Second, it’s a good bet that “the docket” is enriched in individuals with history of serious crime, relative to other immigrants.  That is, of the 7M persons currently on the ICE “docket”, a lot of those people will have some adjudications, and will move rapidly onto and off of the docket.  By contrast, once the ICE finds out that an individual was convicted of a serious crime, that individual remains “on the docket” until that person is given a court order for deportation. And if that that person then does not obey that deportation order, they come back onto the docket and get convicted of failing to obey that court order.

What I’m saying is, it’s a good bet that those cases stay “on the docket” a lot longer than average. Which means that at any point in time, “the docket” is enriched in those cases, relative to plain-vanilla deportation hearings.

Just to drive that home, the mix of crimes on the ICE table (Twitter reference above) is oddly skewed.  rom the same data source showing 13,000 murderers, there are just 77,000 convicted of a traffic offense.  So, on the ICE docket, for every six persons convicted of a traffic offense, there’s one person who was convicted of murder.(?)

For the U.S. as a whole, by contrast, there are about 630,00 DUI convictions per year.  (Calculated from the data table in this source.)  Conversely, there appear to be about 10,000 homicide convictions per year (out of 22,000 or so homicides — the rest are unsolved.)  So each year, the U.S. as a whole has 60 DUI convictions for every homicide conviction.  Or about 10 times as many as show up among the immigrants on the ICE’s list.

So that’s a bit odd.  Whatever the underlying list is, it doesn’t appear to be a cross-section of crime.  It seems heavily skewed toward homicide.

Addendum, the next day, say no more:  As it turns out, the ICE list contains people who are literally in state and federal prison, that is, not detained by ICE.  Presumably, ICE continues to track them so that ICE can kick them out of the country when their prison term is up.  Here’s a quote from CNN reporting on this issue, quoting the Department of Homeland Security:

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a Saturday email: “The data in this letter is being misinterpreted. The data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more, the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration. It also includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.”

Summary

All this tells me is that whatever you think this 13,000-murderers figure represents, it’s not the risk of murder in a given year. 

To be clear, near as anyone can tell, the legal immigrant population is more law-abiding that average, and the illegal immigrant population is about as law-abiding (otherwise) as the U.S. native population.  This, based on analysis of data from Texas, it was just over 2.2 individuals per 100,000 population, just a bit below the U.S. average.

Source:  Cato institute

 

You could, in theory, I guess, avoid any chance of this happening by locking up everyone on the ICE docket — everyone awaiting a deportation hearing.  Change the law so that you have to lock up all 7M people who are currently on the ICE docket, but have been released back into the community.  Taking $50,000/person/year as a reasonable guess at the cost of incarceration (based on eyeballing this map), it would only cost about a third of a billion dollars per year.  Plus some large up-front cost to triple the size of the U.S. prison system, which currently incarcerates just over 2M.

To be clear, you couldn’t just lock up that 13,000.  That’s because, as noted above, their history of homicide conviction was not know at the time the ICE (briefly) held them.  (If it had been known, ICE would not have let them go.  They aren’t crazy, after all.)  At the time they were in ICE custody, you don’t know which 13,000 persons had some prior (unknown-at-the-time) homicide conviction.

So to get them all, you’d have to lock up all of them.  And good luck getting that decision past any reasonable judge, under current law.  You’d likely have to amend the laws to make that legal.

None of this matters.  Republicans have found a statistic that has really horrible optics, so they’re running with it.  Whatever it means. 

As with Haitians eating dogs, there’s no way they’re not going to flog that until their base loses interest.  I’m guessing that, as Haitians-eating-pets was the theme for last week, and 13,000 murderers is going to be the theme for the week ahead.

But passing legislation to reduce the logjam in these court cases, and get these people out of the country sooner?  I’m guessing the Dems aren’t going to be smart enough even to mention who is responsible for killing the legislation that would have helped resolve this issue, within the law.  And the Republicans who killed a seemingly bipartisan attempt to address this huge backlog of cases are certainly never going to mention that they did that.

So, we’re up for another week of macho-sounding stuff on this issue, from the Right.  But no attempts to address it.

It’s just too good a story to pass up.  Even if the people telling it have no idea what it means.  Or whether 13,000 is an unreasonably high or low number.

And, for sure, the folks flogging this are going to ignore any hard numbers on the rate of crimes committed by illegal immigrants in the U.S.  Because those numbers don’t tell the story they want to tell.

This is the way my country works now.

Post #2016: Two Black Women Stole the Election, the re-run

 

If this is already obvious to you, just skip it.  The gist is that the current Springfield, OH kerfuffle is kind of a re-run.

Do you recall the thumb-drive-vote-fraud-two-Black-women thing?  Republicans alleged vote fraud, based on a clip of routine surveillance video in some polling place.  They were completely wrong, but The Right ruined the lives of the poll workers in that video.

And now, instead of death threats for two Black women, it’s a barrage of bomb threats (and who knows what else) for Springfield, Ohio.

But if you trace the arc of the story, these stories really run parallel, and they spring from the same root.

And that root is Republicans’ willingness to promote stories based on their “stickiness”, truth optional.  I argued this point two posts back.

What I’m saying is, the Republicans constructed or merely “amplified” these false stories because they were “sticky”. They were memorable for their target audience.  And not for any higher purpose, unless you consider lying to make a fictional point an adequate substitute for actual government policy.

Take the first one.  I mean, that just ticks all the boxes, doesn’t it?  Name your phobia.  Fear of a) computers, b) black people, and c) women.  In addition to “vote fraud”.

For the Republican base, that’s a triple-sticky story, and way too good to pass up.  I think it literally made no difference whatsoever to the Republican party whether or not that story was true.

Promulgating that particular lie ruined the lives of the poll workers involved.  Who, I am guessing, where chosen solely because they were Black women, and they made some movement over the course of the day that could plausibly be (mis)-interpreted as something nefarious passing from one to the other.

So, school’s closed in Springfield, OH due to bomb threats?  Not intrinsically different from death threats against those two poll workers.  Just not as well-targeted.

Haitians eating pets.  Again, they just could not pass that up. As discussed earlier, that’s at least a double-sticky.

Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice?  I guess that’s the viewpoint.  And when they’ve run that dog until it won’t run any more, I’m sure there’ll be something to take its place.

I prefer a more reality-centered discussion, if possible.

OTOH, the explicit defense, by the Republican Presidential candidate himself, is that he heard it on TV.  He most emphatically heard somebody on TV talking about Haitians eating cats and dogs.

In effect, he said he just retweeting.  So it’s OK, then, right?  Whatever it is, somebody else said it first.

Truth optional?  I think that overstates it.  It gets every bit as much consideration as the inevitable fallout.  Which is to say, none.

People re-tweet things because they like them.  And for a lot of people, I’d say truth is optional there, too.  So maybe Trump is the way the world works now.

 

 

 

 

Post #2014: Stocking up on dog meat.

 

People routinely (and perhaps purposefully) misunderstand statistics on immigration.  In this post, I gather more years of data for the interesting top line of this table, from my just-prior post:

Source:  Department of Homeland Security.

Note that there was no increase in the estimated number of illegal aliens living in the U.S. during this period.

Immigration Rule #6

There is no annual count of the illegal immigrants who successfully crossed the border.  That, for the simple reason that they didn’t get caught.  I went over that in these posts:

Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?

Post #1928: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands, part II

Almost every number you hear quoted as “illegals entering this country” is the count of illegal immigrants who got caught.  Which is kind of a “duh” statement, because, as above, if you didn’t catch them, you can’t directly count them.  Technically, yeah, they are “individuals who crossed into the U.S. illegally.”  Stepping onto U.S. soil is what made it lawful for DHS to arrest them.  But they aren’t illegal immigrants who now live here.  The majority were caught within a few miles of the border and then deported.

Anyway, if you hear “two million” or so, that’s the folks who got caught in any recent year.

Best guess, as summarized in the prior posts on this topic cited above, your odds of making it across the border are maybe 30% to 50%, depending on who’s doing the estimating, and from what data source.  That implies somewhere between one and two million per year successfully illegally crossed the U.S. southern border during that latest surge in attempted illegal immigration.

By contrast, if you hear “ten million”, that’s an estimate of the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. at any given time.

And if you can do simple math, and note that the number of illegal aliens residing in the U.S. doesn’t change much from year-to-year, you quickly realize that there must be a pretty large flow of illegal alien residents who leave the U.S. each year.  Which is really the only point of this post.

Surprise:  There is no strong trend in illegal U.S. residents, through 2022.*

Source:  2015-2018 report, Department of Homeland Security.

* Edit the next day:  There’s now an extended discussion on methodology below.  Original post follows. 

Turns out, based on the best available information, there is no upward trend in illegal U.S. residents.  The slight downward trend evident at the end of the graph above continued right on through 2022.  (As you can see from the very first table posted here.)

If you prefer a simplified graph:

Source:  2022 report, Department of Homeland Security.

Not to restate the obvious, but that’s a couple of decades, over which the estimated number of resident illegal aliens has been fairly stable, at around 10 million.

As I noted in the just-prior post, this count of illegal residents is an indirect estimate.  So there is some reason to question the validity.

That said, the method is consistent, because there are no huge jumps from one Census to the next.  And if you bother to read the report, you can see that these figures jibe with just about every other credible estimate.

It’s reasonable to ask whether this apparent stability is just an artifact of methodology.  I’m guessing not, even though this is remains rooted in the decennial Census.  Note that the numbers remained reasonably stable through three different Census counts. and that, for the most recent counts, DHS uses the annual American Community Survey (also done by Census).  If there had been a big uptick in self-reported foreign-born individuals in 2021, that should have shown up in the 2021 American Community Survey data that form the basis for the last data point shown.

If you read the methodology section of the DHS report in full, there appears to be essentially only one estimate that disagrees with the DHS estimate, and that’s based on some questionable and untestable assumptions.

Pew Research Center (Pew, July 2024) estimates that the number ticked up by 0.5M in 2022.  Their methodology is similar to the one used by DHS.  So, plausibly, the next DHS estimate will also show that uptick.  Looks like the official number from DHS will not be updated until Spring of 2025.

Assuming DHS has that all correct, the bottom line is that this is the only credible estimate that exists, for the number of illegal immigrants currently residing in the U.S.  The nuance you get from Pew is that this latest wave of attempted illegal immigration has, in fact, modestly increased the number of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. 

If I manage to find another estimated that differs markedly (other than the one addressed in the DHS document), I’ll add that in here.

No surprise:  There is no trend in illegal U.S. residents.

This should really not be a huge surprise, unless you believe in magic.  Because these folks have to make a living somehow.  And the number of jobs available to illegal immigrants is small, and the types of jobs are limited.

Well, there’s no legal way for illegal immigrants to get government aid. I went over that in the posts cited above.  Pick a Federal entitlement program and do the research, and you’ll come to the same conclusion.

(Though, technically, I guess if you show up at a hospital ER and are having a medical emergency, the ER must treat you due to EMTALA.  And I think schools have to accept illegal kids.  But you know what I mean.  There’s no life of taxpayer-funded luxury awaiting illegal immigrants.  Any government resources targeting immigrants are available to legal immigrants only, for all intents and purposes.  Illegal immigrants are, for all intents and purposes, un-people according to the government.)

Ponder that a second, and the stability of that population begins to make sense.  If you are here illegally, the only way you can stay here is to get a job.  (That, or rely on private charity of some form.)

And if there are only so many jobs in the U.S. that can routinely be filled by illegal immigrants … then there’s sort of a natural economic capacity for the U.S. to host an illegal immigrant population.

For example, there are only about 1.3M hired crop workers in the U.S.  Of those, about half are illegal immigrants.  (They are a much smaller share of all farm workers, because the majority of farm workers are self-employed or unpaid family members of farm owners.)

Source:  USDA, farm labor.

Note that the vast majority of illegal residents work in industries other than agriculture.  The table above accounts for well under half-a-million illegal U.S. residents.  Best estimate, there are more than seven million illegal immigrants holding down jobs in the U.S. (Pew Trust, 2020).

Near as I can tell, they do pretty much exactly the kind of jobs you’d think they’d do.  Just think of any job that you wouldn’t want to do.

How can this be?

The one thing I am hazy about is the details on hiring.  How can legitimate, tax-paying businesses hire illegal aliens? I mean, yeah, I checked, and it’s unambiguously illegal:

Source:  U.S. Department of Justice.

This newspaper article provides a matter-of-fact view of it.  It’s a straight-up case of don’t ask, don’t tell.  Amongst the common tricks used for long-term employment of illegal aliens by tax-paying businesses are the following:

  • Declaring workers to be independent contractors instead of employees.
  • Requiring no verification of documents.
  • Contracting out the hiring of labor — so that the folks who nominally “hired” the workers aren’t the ones who pay them.

Conclusion:  Now the Republican rhetoric makes sense.

By far, the most mind-blowing statistic I ran across is that, in aggregate, about five percent of the U.S. workforce consists of illegal aliens. 

And, I’m guessing, unless the size of the work force increases, or the fraction of jobs that are amenable to illegal immigrant labor increases, that’s about where it’s going to stay.

Which, in turn, pretty much determines the long-run size of the U.S. illegal-immigrant population.

And in the end, the stability of that resident illegal alien population makes perfect sense, from the standpoint of the underlying economics.

The upshot is that we have a large resident illegal alien population, of a stable size, due to private enterprise employing them, and a lack of government enforcement of the law.

But if you’re Republican, you can’t say that. 

And, in fairness, the bleeding hearts on the other side of the aisle are unlikely to try to kick those folks out of their jobs, if they even could.   They might even consider that undocumented immigrants fill a necessary and productive role in the U.S. economy, on average.  And that, in some sectors such as agriculture, how can I say this, there would be supply-chain disruptions without them.

To put it as plainly as possible, just about nobody in power (with any sense) wants to fire the seven-to-eight million illegal aliens currently doing our least-desirable jobs.  Certainly not all at once.  Some out of sympathy, but the rest out of pragmatism and profit motive.  And sure-as-shootin’ not when the unemployment rate is in the low single digits.

And, to an economist, I have to say, the current multi-tier system for immigrant (non-citizen?) labor looks almost as if it were designed to extract the most possible “value” (in the economic sense) out of that labor.  You offer some guest-workers a 10-month visa, but you limit the number of those that you offer.  The remainder of your guest worrkers, those not here legally under a visa, are then open for whatever the market will bear, in terms of exploitation.

At any rate, back to Republican policy:  So they offer “sticky” stories.  Haitians eating pets.  Crime waves.  Stealing American jobs.  Just throw that at the wall, and see what sticks with their constituents.

So, unfortunately, it looks like dog meat is on the menu for the foreseeable future.  That, because it is verboten for one political party to discuss the private-enterprise financial engine that supports our resident illegal alien population.

* CAVEAT ON THE METHODOLOGY

If you read one of the tiny-type sections above, you’ll see researchers at the Pew Trust recently updated their estimate of the resident illegal-alien population.  They do more-or-less what DHS does, in terms of methods.  They appear to be seeing an uptick in the resident illegal alien population starting starting around 2020.  (And, if you look closely at the DHS graph, they show the same thing, just skipping one data point.)

Source:  Pew, July 2024

If you look carefully at the end of the DHS estimate above, they too show a similar uptick between 2020 and 2022.  They just didn’t fill in a 2021 number.

To the extent that I understand it, they used the count of all foreign born based on a roughly 1% sample (roughly 3 million) records in the 2022 Census ACS PUMS file.  That’s one of the main drivers of change in that resident-illegal-alien number.  (That, and changes in the separate count of legal citizens who were foreign-born.)

I’m not quite sure where I’m going with this, except to say that the 2022 numbers are the most recent available.  And they are good numbers, if you believe that recent illegal immigrants will answer the American Community Survey (in proportion to the extent that Census thinks their demographic does), and admit to being foreign-born.  (Or, alternatively, they are good for showing trends, if any presumed proportional undercount remains constant.)

The only thing missing, really, is a “flash estimate” of what the population is likely to be today, after two more years of high rates of attempted illegal immigration.

I don’t think anybody does one, at least not publicly.

So the best you can say is that, through 2022, there was only a modest uptick in the resident illegal immigrant population of the U.S.

Post #1933: A short, simple explanation of U.S. immigration law

 

/s.  The title is sarcasm.  This post isn’t about explaining U.S. immigration policy.  It’s about giving up trying to understand it, let alone explain it.

U.S. immigration policy is a stew cooked from ancient and modern quotas, agribusiness needs, humanitarian concerns, special exceptions, vestigial ethnic, racial, and religious bias, aftermath-of-war, left-over anti-communism, workforce shortages, national security issues …you name it.

It’s a dish where everybody gets to toss in an ingredient.  Or maybe everybody who can pay to play gets to.  It’s hard to tell.

Policy consists of turning a blind eye to the results, until it’s politically expedient to do otherwise.

 

And by “blind eye”, I don’t mean merely pretending that those folks don’t exist.  Although there’s plenty of that.

It’s knowing they are there, and dismissing it with a shrug.  Ever wonder why they don’t just impose stiff fines on the businesses who hire illegal aliens?  I mean, putting all the right-wing nonsense aside, if nobody would hire you, there wouldn’t be much incentive to immigrate here illegally, would there?

Ponder this:  About 44% of paid U.S. crop workers are illegal aliens.

Who says so, and how do they know?  Who says that so many agribusinesses engage in such a gross violation of Federal law?  The Federal government does.  That’s straight out of the U.S. Department of Labor, National Agricultural Workers Survey.  (From their 2019-2020 survey results summary, available as a .pdf at this link.)  And that’s the percent of folks who were willing to be interviewed, and willing to admit that they lacked legal status to work in the U.S.   But that’s after excluding all workers under H-2A temporary agricultural worker visas, from the sampling frame, to begin with.)

So it’s not as if this is some unknown, unquantifiable practice.  It’s an integral part of the U.S. food supply.  It continues because in normal times, nobody is quite crazy enough to try to disrupt that without having something else ready to take its place.

Which, needless to say, we ain’t got.

For the past few decades, the “politically expedient to do otherwise” periods seem to occur just after peaks in immigration.

And since we’re having a peak now, you’d expect another round of doing something about it. Beyond the billion or two we’ve been spending each year,  now, to fix the worst holes in the Mexican border.

And so, I finally arrive at the cause of this particular screed.

By report, a large majority of U.S. Senators are on board with beefing up security at the Mexican border.  Among other things.

But it sure looks like nothing will happen, because the Republican candidate for President sees it as too good a political issue to allow it to be solved on somebody else’s watch (reference).  And as an added bonus, we can make Putin happy by hanging Ukraine out to dry.  As part of our non-action on this issue.  And the Governor of Texas can defy the U.S. Supreme Court, with impunity.  Ah, that’s an overstatement, but it’s close enough.  Narrowlly construed, I think the Court ruling merely means that the Border Patrol can continue to remove the razor wire that gets in the way of them doing their jobs,  even as the Texas National Guard continues to lay more razor wire.  Not because it makes sense, or is effective.  But because that’s unbeatable political theater.

This is U.S. immigration policy?  Yep, it’s what passes for it, in the current situation.

Define U.S. immigration policy?  Apparently, it’s whatever the Republican executives want it to be.  Nothing more and nothing less.

Maybe I see the past through rose-colored glasses.  Maybe it’s because I spent a decade working for a U.S. legislative-branch agency, and ended up with a lot of respect for then- members of Congress.  But I swear that the U.S. Congress didn’t used to be anywhere near this screwed up.

Post #1928: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands, part II

 

In the prior post I established some basic facts.

1:  We’re still running somewhere around 2M unsuccessful attempts at illegal immigration, per year, at the Mexican border.  This is about a third higher than the previous peaks in FY 1986 (1.6M, Reagan) and FY 2000 (1.6M, Clinton).

Source:  Ultimately, the data are from US DHS, but read the prior post to see what I had to do to generate a consistent timeseries, including COVID-based expulsions,.

2: There are no hard numbers on the count of successful attempts at illegal immigration, per year, at the Mexican border.  That’s the subject of this post.  How do they estimate the number of illegal immigrants successfully crossing the Mexican border?

3:  The Congress has been funding increased personnel, barriers, and tracking technology at this border for decades, and continues to do so today.  That includes 1986 legislation that doubled the size of border patrol staff, and 2006 legislation that authorized 700 miles of walls/fences.  In recent years, the Congress has been funding “border barrier construction” at the rate of about $1.5B/year.  I believe this funding is what Biden administration is using to patch a few of the worst known holes in the Mexican border, in Arizona.

Source:  DHS Border Barrier Funding, Updated January 29, 2020, Congressional Research Service
https://crsreports.congress.gov, R45888   NOTE that there’s a large pot of money not under the control of DHHS that is not accounted for in the recent-year data.  As of this writing, I don’t know what that’s being used for.

I recommend that CRS report, cited just above, because you can see how rational the border control strategy was, at least historically.  To nobody’s surprise, they called in experts from the DoD, and they focused the resources on the easiest/busiest illegal entry routes first (CRS report, op cit, page 2).

That $1.5B a year is in addition to the roughly $6B one-time transfer within the Department of Defense budget, attempted by then-President Trump, to various border security projects.  Of which, only about $2.1B in total is available to be spent, the rest being tied up due to the (ahem) unorthodox way in which the funds were allocated, in part, via a declaration of a National Emergency. (This, as of the 2019 CRS report cited below.)

If you want to know what the DoD has been up to, with the monies re-allocated via declaration of National Emergency, there’s a corresponding CRS report on that, as of 2019, but I couldn’t quite make out what has actually taken place under that funding (reference available on this web page).  Near as I can tell, at the time that report was written, seven sections of border fence/wall were were agreed-upon to be built under DoD funding authority. But it’s clear that funding it this way created a lot of legal and other messes, some of which have resulted in the majority of funds not being spendable for border security.

Efforts by DHS to Estimate Southwest Border Security between Ports of Entry

Rather than re-invent the wheel and do my own research, I’m just going to summarize a 2017 report by the US DHS, with the title shown above (reference).  This is, in effect, a report by the Government, on the performance of the Government, so it’s not clear whether there are any explicit or implicit biases in the analysis.   If nothing else, it’s probably about as good a summary of the technical problem as you are likely to find.

This is a report done at the behest of the Congress, given the attention that then-President Trump was focusing on the Mexican border.  As described in the Report:

Congress has directed the Department to provide more detailed reporting on southwest border security. The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2017 directs the Department to publish “metrics developed to measure the effectiveness of security between the ports of entry, including the methodology and data supporting the resulting measures."

To paraphrase, how good a job are you doing now, at preventing illegal immigration across that border, and how do you estimate that?

So this report is exactly what I’m looking for.

Total interdiction rate, including those who turn back after crossing the border:  Implied successful illegal immigration rate of about 30% per attempt.

 

The report spends a of time talking about deterrence.  That is, the people who don’t even try to cross illegally, because we’ve made it tough for them to do so.  Or who turn back, once they see US DHS personnel.  And similar.

For example, US Border Patrol (USBP) personnel count “turn-backs”, that is, estimates of the number of persons who cross the border into the U.S., but turn back and return to Mexico once they spot USBP personnel there.

The USBP also counts “got aways”, that is, individuals observed to have made it past border security.  Essentially, these are reported either by direct observation, or by noticing signs of passage and inferring the number of people involved.

From such counts, plus apprehensions, US DHS calculates a couple of “interdiction rates”, that is, the fraction of all persons attempting to cross, who get successfully turned back.  One of those rates relies solely on data that U.S. DHS personnel observe, and so excludes most of the successful illegal immigrants.  A second estimate of the interdiction rate includes some estimate of illegal immigrants who managed to evade US DHS.

In round numbers, by the end of the period, the US DHS estimate for the success rate at crossing the Mexican border is 30%.  The other 70% either turned back voluntarily when they spotted USBP, or they were caught.

(Note that you CANNOT multiply 30%, times the roughly 2 million illegal immigrants caught at the border each year, to estimate the number of illegal immigrants at about 600K per year.  That’s because the TIR above also includes a count of “turn backs”, who are persons who were NOT apprehended crossing the border.  Based on the above, the estimated number of illegal immigrants has to be higher than that.)

But that depends critically on the very last factor above — the estimated (successful) illegal entries.

How do they estimate that?

Survey data, including only apprehensions (not turn-backs), implied successful crossing rate 50% to 70% per attempt.

There are several long-running surveys of migrants where they ask how often they’ve tried to cross into the U.S., and how frequently they’ve gotten caught.  I cannot even imagine what the potential sampling bias issues are for such surveys.  All I can say is that this DHS report summarizes the results of three long-running academically-sponsored surveys as shown above:  Roughly a 30% to 50% chance of being apprehended on any on attempt at border crossing.

So those who were willing to be surveyed — on either side of the border — report getting caught a lot less frequently than the US DHS “TIR” methodology would suggest.

near-border Repeat offenders, the partial apprehension rate:  Implied successful illegal crossing rate of perhaps 50%.

A final method used by US DHS is to track people who were caught and released into Mexico. Guess how many are likely to try it again.  Then see how many they catch a second time.

Once caught, they record “biometric” information, which I guess is fingerprints, face scans, and similar.  (So that they know if they catch them again.)

They restrict their analysis solely to individuals who live near the border.

Using a survey-based estimate, they take a guess at the fraction of those folks who are likely to try to enter illegally again.

And then they count the number that they catch a second time.

That yields the Partial Apprehension Rate shown above.  Admittedly, these are folks who by definition have had some practice at crossing.  But also, by definition, weren’t particularly good at it.  So, FWIW, they estimate that about half of that population successfully immigrates illegally across the Mexican border, on their second attempt.  And they take that estimate — roughly 50% — as a reasonable guess for the overall rate of successful illegal immigration.

Conclusion

I could go on.  This report presents its own complex estimate of likely count of illegal immigrants, but I honestly didn’t follow the logic or the resulting numbers.

The only real bottom line is that the Mexican border is quite porous, and that successful illegal immigration occurs routinely.  You could quibble over just how large a fraction, but as a good working estimate, you’d be justified in guessing that about half the people who try it succeed.

Moreover, there’s no strong trend there.  The is maybe a little harder to cross now, compared to (say) 20 years ago.  But only a little.

We’re currently targeting a billion or two a year at building and reconstructing walls and fences along the border, adding other security measures, and so on.  I’m hardly an expert, but I’m not seeing anything on the plate right now that hasn’t been there for the past couple of decades.

In any case, given the history of this, I think the notion that we’re somehow going to seal that border air-tight strikes me as somewhat far-fetched. Or expensive beyond our willingness to pay, take your pick.

My prediction is that the current Congress — if it can be prodded into action — will do what prior Congresses have done.  Address the worst known points for illegal entry.  Place a few more patches on the existing system.  And wait for the problem to go away for another decade or so.

No matter how you slice it, the influx of a million destitute people a year, in those border states, has to be putting a strain on something.

Despite the rhetoric, some Federal money goes to support whatever-it-is that communities in border states have to spend more money on, in response.  And while illegal (undocumented) immigrants (migrants) are not eligible for (e.g.) Medicaid, the Feds do, in fact, give communities money to deal with the basic humanitarian issues of food and shelter.  (E.g., $290M, per this press release).  Allocated like so, to local charities in those states, showing just the first few listed alphabetically:

But if you read the fine print, none of that applies to successful illegal immigrants, those who got across the border without being apprehended.  Or are not claiming asylum.  And so on.  Those grants to local charities only apply to those who have been “processed” in some form, by immigration authorities.

So at present, there’s a large influx of very poor people, who are almost by definition outside of “the system” and are categorically ineligible for any type of direct Federal assistance.  For example, they can’t get food stamps (reference).  They are, effectively, un-people.

The only major exception is for children.  Even if their parents crossed the border illegally, in theory, the U.S. won’t allow them to starve.  I think.  And schools that take Federal funds have to enroll them.  I think.  Including free and reduced price lunches, if they are not too scared to apply for that.

And so, we have this weird situation in those border states.  Everybody with any sense realizes they’re getting a million or so people a year, currently mostly refugees from bad conditions in South and Central America.  Or just looking for a better life.  Who crossed the border illegally.  And it’s a fantasy to expect that to stop any time soon.  If ever.  But the Feds can’t do anything to ease the resulting strain on state and local governments, because that large population falls entirely outside of the law.

Everybody knows they’re there, somewhere.  Everybody can see that more are coming.  But nobody can help state and local governments deal with the bulk of the problem.  Because that million-a-year influx consists of people who have no legal standing.  And so we carry on, with policy-by-fantasy, or policy-by-turning-a-blind-eye.  Or no policy at all.

Addendum:  Gross versus net, or missing the reverse flow.

Source:  Immigrationpolicy.org

Notice anything odd about the graph above?  If there’s this huge ongoing influx of illegal immigrants … why are all the curves flat?  Why isn’t the estimate of illegal alien U.S. residents rising?

What I’ve looked at so far is the gross inflow of illegal immigrants across the border.   The graph above looks at the net number of illegal aliens living here.  Assuming both estimates are reasonably close to correct, there has to be a pretty big outflow of illegal immigrants, back out of the U.S.

So, as a matter of logic, I’m missing a potentially large flow of people in my overall analysis of illegal immigration.  Some fraction of successful illegal immigrants — those who cross the border illegally, and end up settled somewhere away from the border — eventually cross back.  To get at net illegal immigration, I should, in theory, subtract out that flow.

(And there’s also some fraction of that population lost to illegal immigrants who are granted some form of amnesty, and so convert to legal status.  But there hasn’t been a large-scale amnesty program since Reagan, I think.  Maybe there was one under Clinton?  And then there are attempts to convert the ambiguous legal status of individuals who came here illegally as children but are now grown-up Americans — without legal residency status.)

Historically, there seems to have been a reasonably large reciprocal flow of Mexicans returning to Mexico, from the U.S.  In fact, since 2008, more Mexican nationals have left the U.S. than have entered, by some estimates.  (Or this NY Times article, if you prefer a human interest story to mere statistics.).

To that you’d have to add anybody deported from the interior of the U.S., as only those captured near the border are counted in apprehensions.  (And even there, I’m not sure of the status of long-term illegal residents of communities near the border, who end up being deported as illegal aliens).

By all accounts, if you followed the graph above for another couple of years, there would have likely been an uptick.  But not nearly as much as you might guess, purely from the estimated gross flow of illegal aliens across the border.

Thus, the final lesson for today is that the net growth in the illegal immigrant population in the U.S. is far less than the gross influx of illegal immigrants in any year.

It’s a slight mis-statement to put it this way, but our porous border is porous in both directions.

Addendum 2:  Overstays

Prior to (say) 2017 or so, the single largest source of new illegal U.S. residents every year was individuals who overstayed their visas.  They entered the U.S. legally as tourists, students, or workers, with a visa specifying a defined period of residence, or perhaps legal residence when accomplishing some defined task (e.g., a course of graduate study).  And then the U.S. has no record of their departure, prior to the expiration of that visa.

In the FY 2022 Overstay report, by US DHS, 3.67 percent of persons with such visas overstated their visa, resulting in about 850,000 persons who were, for some period of time, illegal residents of the U.S., because they overstayed their visas.

Aside from that one factoid, I gleaned nothing else useful from that overstay report.  It’s not clear to me how much of that is bookkeeping errors, how much is persons who overstayed by a few days, and so on.  How many eventually left.  And so on.

So it’s hard to make much out of that, except to say that prior to the latest increase in likely illegal immigration at the Mexican border, that was consistently the single largest category of annual “illegal immigration”.  Take that for what it’s worth.

Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?

 

This is the first of what may end up as a series of posts on the statistics of illegal immigration across the Mexican border.  

Unlike my usual style, I’m just going to present my conclusions here, and put the citation of sources, evidence, and analysis in separate posts.  If I get around to it.  Because, to be fair, the conclusions aren’t what I expected to see.  And this is a topic where I don’t think people’s opinions are much swayed by evidence anyway.

One simple question:  How do they know?

Source: How to Lie With Statistics,

I didn’t intend to do a series of posts on this topic.  I just wanted a simple answer to what I thought was a fairly obvious question.  The most basic question you can ask about a statistic, as shown above.

That snowballed.  But here’s where I started.

You’ll see various posts and news reporting (loosely defined) claiming that millions of illegal immigrants are coming into the U.S. every year, via the Mexican border.

These claims immediately pinged my bullshit detector, for a very simple reason:

How do they know?

For every law enforcement statistic I know of, official numbers count those who were caught.  But here, how do they count the people who weren’t caught, the ones who made it safely (but illegally) into the U.S., via the Mexican border?

Once you start prying away at that question, you soon discover a whole nested set of additional questions. A set of matrioshka cans-of-worms, if you will.

 

But let’s just stop at the first question.

How do they count the people who successfully illegally immigrate across the U.S.-Mexican border? Continue reading Post #1927: Will those who succeeded in immigrating illegally please raise your hands?