Why Are Border Apprehensions So Low?
A Trump Effect? What Does That Even Mean?
In January, I wrote that apprehensions along the southwestern border were rising sharply, suggesting a rising wave of illegal immigration. I suggested that there was a lot of uncertainty about what was going on with the data, but that annual-total levels were likely to remain somewhat elevated given basic feature of the data, unless we got a truly historic drop in inflows.
Well, the funny thing is, we got a historic drop in apprehensions right after that. The last data I had at the time was December of 2016. It fell by a quarter in January, and by the same amount again in February. Further declines in March and April mean we have had the 3 lowest months of apprehensions since at least 1999, with April setting a new record low. Here’s a graph:
So I wrote my post at that most recent peak out on the right.
Life comes at you fast!
Declines were most severe among families and kids, but appear among general apprehensions as well, though the general apprehensions start their decline a month earlier.
Here’s total apprenehsions over the preceding 12 month period:
As you can see, it’s fallen, much as the previous peak fell. If the current pace continues, we could easily end up with a calendar-year 2017 total of under 200,000 apprehensions, an unprecedented number. If we calculate out recent months, forecast upcoming months, and aggregate as fiscal years, we can compare to historic data.
Here we see that, if current rates of apprehension continue, we could be on the cusp of the lowest SW border apprehensions since 1969. That’s striking. Of course, just as apprehensions fell sharply in recent months, it’s possible they could spike sharply in the future. Historically, apprehensions have not been that hard to predict… but the last 24 months have seen unprecedented deviations from normal trends.
This post is not about the politics of illegal immigration. It’s about providing some baseline figures and informing people what’s going on. But these figures so flatly contradicted my own expectations that I feel a need to offer at least some basic outlines of an explanation. I’m not entirely settled, so I venture no prediction at all about where apprehensions are actually headed. But let’s consider some possible explanations of this data.
Policy or Enforcement Change
Maybe there’s been a big change in border enforcement. I’m skeptical of this one, but maybe! In DHS Secretary Kelly’s public comments on the matter he definitely claims enforcement actions are making the difference, but he doesn’t say what those actions are, and the actions he does list are initiatives that have been underway by the Obama Administration for a long time. There are some accounts of U.S. officials turning away asylum-seekers. But it’s not clearly precisely what the policy change actually is here, if anything. I’m going to go ahead and suggest that there has been very little actual policy change. Certainly there’s no more wall than there was, no more patrols, no reform of immigration law altering the status of new arrivals, etc.
Data Quality Problems
This possibility worries me very much. Note the article above about CBP turning away asylum-seekers. The suggestion here is CBP did not process the paperwork for the asylum-seekers, meaning they’ll never show up in DHS data as a rejected asylum-seeker. They just vanish. Maybe they show up as an official deportation, maybe not. I’m not even entirely sure if these apprehensions are being reported. It is possible that although there is no policy change, DHS may have gotten a bit looser in reporting for some classes of migrant. That is, maybe attempted inflows haven’t fallen as much as it seems; maybe DHS just isn’t reporting as completely as they were in the past. This possibility would be deeply worrying. DHS also reports cases where people arriving are deemed “inadmissable,” these have declined as well, but that offers very little clarity.
Change in Conditions
Maybe relative economic conditions and transit costs have shifted sufficiently that illegal immigration is less economical. This seems odd since the U.S. economy has continued to chug along at a good clip, but maybe Mexico and Central America are doing better than in the past. I don’t know about that, as I don’t follow their monthly or quarterly economic activity. GDP growth was much faster in the quarter ending with December 2016 in several of the Central American countries. Mexico’s unemployment rate has come down some as well. So maybe things are just getting a bit better in the sending-countries. This would be encouraging news!
Signals Matter
The most interesting possibility, of course, is something else entirely. One of the stories floating around about the child-asylum-seeker crisis a few years back was that rumors about increased generosity of asylum in the US provoked a tide of migrants. Whether there was a real policy change or not isn’t the point here; the story has been about perceptions of U.S. policy. What was the perception of President Obama’s immigration policy in sending-countries? Well, I’m not entirely sure, but it seems plausible that he was seen as comparatively generous and open-handed, while President Trump is seen as very severe and strict. President Trump has launched a wave of deportations, but President Obama set deportation records as well. In other words, it may be possible that there is a “Trump effect” which has nothing to do with policy. Maybe potential migrants aren’t coming to the U.S. because they think the Trump Administration will do horrible things to them, even though what actually happens to a given apprehendee is almost certainly going to be the same under President Trump as it was under President Obama. If indeed mere perception can driven these enormous changes in migration, then that opens the door to a whole host of policy instruments for migration. But more research would need to be done on migrant- and host-country perceptions to verify this story.
Conclusion
Any of the above could be behind these falling inflows. Or maybe none of them. I’ve revised downward my assessment of how well I understand this data and what it tells us about migration. Hopefully, as the year progresses, we will get more information.
Check out my Podcast about the history of American migration.
If you like this post and want to see more research like it, I’d love for you to share it on Twitter or Facebook. Or, just as valuable for me, you can click the recommend button at the bottom of the page. Thanks!
Follow me on Twitter to keep up with what I’m writing and reading. Follow my Medium Collection at In a State of Migration if you want updates when I write new posts. And if you’re writing about migration too, feel free to submit a post to the collection!
I’m a native of Wilmore, Kentucky, a graduate of Transylvania University, and also the George Washington University’s Elliott School. My real job is as an economist at USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, where I analyze and forecast cotton market conditions. I’m married to a kickass Kentucky woman named Ruth.
My posts are not endorsed by and do not in any way represent the opinions of the United States government or any branch, department, agency, or division of it. My writing represents exclusively my own opinions. I did not receive any financial support or remuneration from any party for this research.
