For the month of October, US Customs and Border Protection reported 66,337 apprehensions at the US unsecured southwest border. This is 12,000 higher than the previous month and the highest for October since 2005. For context, October's apprehensions averaged twice the level for the month during the Obama years.
The dynamics here once again demonstrate the difficulty of trying to address black markets -- including the black market in migrant labor -- with an enforcement-based approach. I have written earlier of the 'whack-a-mole' nature of black markets. This is but another example, in this case driven by a change in enforcement policy. In March, the Trump administration issued a directive allowing Border Patrol to "swiftly expel migrants they consider health risks to their home country or their last transit country (in this case Mexico)," as Pew Research put it. Border Patrol might reasonably deem pretty much all illegal crossers as public health risks and briskly deposit them on the far side of the Mexico border. After a nice lunch and a rest break, these same migrants could take another crack at the border. Hence the swift rise in apprehensions of Mexican men. Whack-a-mole, indeed.
As we wrote last time, this situation looks to deteriorate until, at a minimum, a vaccine is made available to Border Patrol personnel, and possibly until a vaccine is made available to border crossers more generally (ironically). In any event, the numbers suggest the border problem will continue to worsen as long as the current 'catch-and-boot' regime lasts, possibly through Q1 2021. If so, the apprehension numbers in the December to March period could once again be eye-popping and a policy priority -- or at least a policy headache -- for the incoming Biden administration.
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The US border enforcement system is often described as dysfunctional, but it is in fact functioning just as specified. Rather, the specification is dysfunctional. But then why not change it?
Both left and right are stuck in an emotional mindset. On the left (note, on the left), CATO and GMU tend to see migrants as poor people requiring our help, and therefore, the goal of US policy is to be 'nice' to undocumented immigrants. The US should provide such migrants all sorts of support and certainly better-than-market terms.
On the right, undocumented immigrants are sometimes treated as barely human and entirely criminal, and thus police-style enforcement is called for.
In a market-based approach, such migrants are treated as regular people, intrinsically neither better nor worse than the rest of us. And like the rest of us, they need to make difficult trade-offs in life decisions, but are assumed -- even though they may be less educated-- as capable of making their own way. Such migrants are considered to be simply following economic opportunity and the hope for a better life. We make no assumptions about their moral character other than to note that they will play by the rules as enforced on the field, not as recorded in law or regulation.
The high conservative perspective therefore seeks to create order, not niceness, but at the same time rejects bullying and hatred. Order means safety, permission, propriety, conformity and compensation. Order, by extension, makes bullying and hatred not only unacceptable, but unnecessary, because it eliminates the principal causes of such hatred, notably illegal behavior. All this, however, must occur within the framework of constrained sovereignty. A blanket closure of the unsecured southwest border has proved and will always be impossible. However, a model which channels migrant flows using a market framework will work and produce outcomes acceptable to most conservatives, including closing the unsecured southwest border to illegal immigration.
The challenges are not principally technical. We understand the dynamics of and fixes for black markets, and we have all the technology and technocratic skill to create an orderly border market. The challenges, instead, are in the heads of the think tank analysts who are captive to preconceptions about the nature of Latin American migrants, that they must either be coddled as wards of the state or prosecuted as criminals to be tossed in jail or deported. We see a third way. In a market-based system, we treat migrants as everyday people looking for a better life and willing to play by the rules if the incentives and processes are properly structured.