More immigrants are travelling in family groups, with children
ON MARCH 5th, Kevin McAleenan, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, announced that February had seen an eleven-year high in unauthorised border crossings from Mexico. He called this a “both a border security and a humanitarian crisis,” and suggested it “enables smuggling while enriching criminals.” That echoes the language of President Donald Trump who argues the situation on America’s southern border warrants a national emergency—and a border wall.
The crisis is not an issue of national security. As David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank, has noted, there has not been a terrorist attack committed in America by a person who crossed the border illegally in more than four decades. Undocumented immigrants as a group are considerably more law-abiding than American citizens. Migrants as a whole are less than half as likely as natural-born Americans to be in jail.
More than half of those detained in February of this year were in “family units” claiming asylum from violence in Central America. El Salvador and Honduras have the world’s highest murder rates; increasing violence in those countries may have fuelled the rise in the number of families claiming asylum. They cannot be sent back across the border without legal proceedings—unlike the single adult migrants that accounted for the considerable bulk of apprehensions 20 years ago.
In a failed attempt to reduce the flow of asylum seekers, the Department of Homeland Security has been turning away applicants at official entry points along the Mexican border. As a result, families have moved to cross in remote areas where their journeys can become a lot more complex and dangerous. Mr Bier says that in 1998 the Border Patrol found one dead migrant for every 5,767 apprehensions. That climbed in 2017 to one for every 1,034.
Earlier this year the Trump administration requested $800m worth of additional resources to care for children and families at the border. But the request was tied to demands for funding a border wall, which Congress rejected. The Homeland Security budget passed in February provided financing for humanitarian work, but it reduced financing for detention centres on the grounds Congress preferred alternatives including monitoring asylum seekers in the community.
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