Customs and Border Protection report that 35,444 persons were apprehended crossing the unsecured US southwest border in October. This was about 5,000 less than the previous month and essentially average for the last decade. It was also about 1,500 below our forecast for the month.

Almost all of the improvement, as in the last several months, has come from the 'families' category. That is, traditional illegal border jumping has not much changed, but families, particularly from the Northern Triangle countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have been effectively deterred from attempting to cross Mexico into the US.

Interestingly, inadmisibles also came in low by recent standards. Inadmisibles are those who present themselves at official crossing points but are denied entry for some reason. These had been running above our January forecast all year, but have now fallen back to our a priori expectations.

The border appears to be coming back under control in terms of new apprehensions. Of course, there is still a massive backlog in the courts and with respect to migrants being held under various auspices, but the incoming flow has now normalized to more typical levels, and as last month, President Trump can take the credit.

If President Trump wants to improve his odds with impeachment proceedings, he would do well to go on the offense -- for example, with market-based visas or some other interesting new initiative — to demonstrate that he is still on the job and working to develop new approaches to ongoing issues. It wouldn't be hard to draw up a list of interesting projects.