Customs and Border Protection reported 181,160 apprehensions at the US southwest border for the month of August. This was essentially unchanged from the prior month and was the second highest August on record, bested only by last year's 195,500.
Apprehensions for the month were once again running ahead of our forecast, 18,000 above our forecast of 163,000. Ordinarily, apprehensions decline seasonally heading into the fall. They did not this year, probably due to a revival of the US job market from mid-summer, as well as, of course, the de facto open borders policy at the Rio Grande. Fiscal year-to-date apprehensions have reached 2.0 million, a new record, even with one month left in the fiscal year. This comfortably exceeds the prior record of 1.66 million set by the Biden administration in fiscal year 2021.
Our apprehensions forecast for the fiscal and calendar year nudges up to 2.2 million due to rounding, but remains essentially unchanged since we first published it in January.
Inadmissibles, those attempting crossing at official entry points without appropriate documentation, also rose in August. There is no obvious explanation for this, other than that such persons are being granted entry into the US interior. As such, both the apprehensions and inadmissibles numbers suggest a weakening of border control over the last two months.
Martha's Vineyard, Hypocrisy and Cynicism
In a cheeky move, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis flew four dozen migrants to Martha's Vineyard last week. This has created quite the brouhaha up here in Cape Cod, but it highlights the hypocrisy of the 'enlightened' left, as well as showing DeSantis capable of cynically deploying undocumented immigrants to make a political point.
Hypocrisy means acting in a manner inconsistent with one's stated beliefs. A prohibition -- including one in migrant labor -- creates such hypocrisy by pitting one's self interest against his social interest. That is, the elites of Martha's Vineyard claim to be all for poor, undocumented migrants, but not in their town. DeSantis, by shipping migrants to the Vineyard, has exposed this hypocrisy, but in a cynical way. DeSantis was not principally motivated by the ostensible goal of providing jobs for migrants, but rather intended to damage the reputation of the left by exposing their hypocrisy in the matter.
Thus, hypocrisy implies actions contradicting stated beliefs, and cynicism implies looking for hidden intentions behind those ostensibly motivating action. In both cases, self-interest is divorced from social interest. The individual is motivated to act in contraction of his stated goals or beliefs.
To attribute hypocrisy to the left or cynicism to DeSantis misses the point. Such anti-social behavior arises from US government policy, which sets the price of a work visa close to zero and consequently provides a grossly inadequate number of visas for those who desire them. The predictable result is a black market in migrant labor where all the participants have an incentive to behave in a manner inconsistent with their stated goals and beliefs. Hypocrisy and cynicism are but side effects of trying to enforce a prohibition, and this applies to all prohibitions and black markets. For example, the EU's embargo on Russian oil -- another prohibition -- exhibits the same traits in an even more pronounced fashion..
Solving the problem does not require moral rectitude. Instead, in the case of migrant labor, H2 visa issuance has to change from a volume-based approach to a market-price based approach. If visas were available at their true market value, migrant-related cynicism and hypocrisy would disappear, not in years, but in days.