With the release of the September JOLTS data this past week, revisiting the relationship of job openings to border apprehensions is in order.
We had earlier argued that illegal immigration is largely driven by the US job market. The JOLTS data continues to support this view. In the last eighteen months or so, in percentage terms, the change in southwest border apprehensions has tended to equal twice the change in job openings. Therefore, if US job openings rose by 2%, we would expect to see border apprehensions increase by 4%. The sign is generally in the right direction, and the coefficient broadly holds up. That is, more job openings almost always mean higher apprehensions; and a big increase in job openings tends to produce a big increase in apprehensions. This is as we would expect for a black market, including the black market in migrant labor: Demand drives supply (and if you follow that logic, it leads to a need for amnesty).
Source: BLS JOLTS, Customs and Border Protection, Princeton Policy analysis
Of course, job openings are not the only driver of illegal immigration. Border policies also matter. For example, the Obama administration saw a smaller surge (or more correctly, a return to more typical migration patterns) in 2014. The administration cracked down and was able to reduce apprehensions even as job openings were increasing.
Just the opposite has happened under the Biden administration. Border apprehensions surged by 100,000 per month from January to April of this year, a rise of 130%, while job openings were up only 30% during the same four month stretch. Clearly, the big surge in border arrests in the first months of the Biden administration was due to a change in enforcement policies, not job openings. However, since then, border traffic has tended to mirror job openings.
We can use the historical data to allocate border crossings to various policy initiatives. Given the recent level of job openings, we would have expected to see 1.1 million border apprehensions for calendar year 2021 applying the Trump administration's border regime. This is a high number, indeed, the highest since the Great Recession. However, 1.1 million apprehensions were absolutely routine under the Bush administration in the early 2000s. A return to this level reflects not much more than the gradual dissipation of the effects of the Great Recession and a return to normal levels of illegal immigration.
The allocation of border apprehensions to the Biden stimulus program is trickier. How many job openings would the US have if the stimulus were not in place? It depends a great deal on the organic pace of recovery from the pandemic, but figure perhaps 6 million job openings versus 10.4 million posted for September. This suggests that, of the 1.1 million expected apprehensions, 0.6 million would represent the anticipated base (business-as-usual) level, and another 0.5 million would have resulted from the various stimulus programs. This is not all bad news. A high level of job openings represents a strong economy; a similarly correspondingly high level of apprehensions is merely the response of the black market in migrant labor to US job opportunities.
Of course, we forecast total calendar year, southwest border apprehensions at 1.9 million versus 1.1 million resulting from underlying economic trends and the various stimulus packages. The difference, 800,000, therefore can be reasonably attributed to the administration's Open Borders policy. We can see this surge of 100,000 monthly to April of this year, which added together month by month totals about 800,000 for the year as a whole.
Therefore, of the 1.9 million southwest border apprehensions we forecast for calendar year 2021, 600,000 represents the base layer which would be anticipated even without the stimulus packages; another 500,000 apprehensions arise from the administration's various stimulus initiatives; and 800,0000 of the total can be plausibly allocated to the administration's Open Borders policies.
This 800,000 also represents the wedge for 2021 between Democratic and Republican positions regarding discussions of amnesty. Republicans could reasonably require that those migrants who entered the country under the Biden Open Borders policy be removed from the country before any discussion of amnesty for long-term undocumented residents can be undertaken. Given that we are not very good at removing undocumented immigrants, such a condition may never be fulfilled, and thus discussions of amnesty may not be resumed until the Open Borders period fades from memory, figure 2030 or so. Alternatively, a resurgent Republican Party may finds itself with a mandate to remove the undocumented come 2024. In either event, the prospects for amnesty -- in our terms, renewable H2 visas for long-term undocumented residents -- have been greatly diminished by President Biden and the various immigration advocates who have endorsed an open borders policy.