Here’s What’s Really Happening at the Border

If you want to know what things are like on our southern border, one way to find out is to go down there and talk with the people who live there. Learn about their lives, and the lives of folks on the other side who want to get in. Put a human face on the whole thing.

But that’s not my style. When I want to know what’s happening, I look at the numbers. So here you go: five pairs of charts that tell the real story of the so-called crisis on our southern border.

1. The Basic Numbers

Since its peak in 2007, the population of unauthorized immigrants has been steadily dropping. And the number of deportations and other removals has been dropping every year since 2004.

2. Apprehensions

The number of unauthorized immigrants apprehended at the border has been dropping ever since 2000. Border Patrol agents apprehend about 400,000 migrants per year, one quarter the number of two decades ago. In the interior of the country, ICE agents arrest about 13,000 people per month, half the level of only six years ago.

3. Crime

Most of the evidence suggests that unauthorized immigrants commit less violent crime than US natives. As you can see, the top chart shows that states with higher levels of unauthorized immigrants also tend to have lower crime rates. (Note: If this seems unlikely to you, it’s probably because you think of places like Texas and California as high-crime states. They aren’t. California has always been below the national average, and Texas has been below it for all but a few years since 1990.)

Don’t take this chart to mean more than it does. Despite the careful work of the authors, I don’t think it proves that unauthorized immigrants commit substantially fewer crimes than natives. There’s just too much going on to say that with confidence, and anyway, the size of the immigrant population is too small to drive large differences in crime rates at a state level. However, it does provide pretty strong evidence that unauthorized immigrants don’t commit crimes at higher rates than natives. Most likely, they’re about equally crime prone compared to natives, or perhaps a bit less.

The second chart shows the percentage of deportations that are based on criminal activity. Under four different presidents, it’s been going down steadily. This suggests pretty strongly that there simply aren’t very many criminals to deport these days.

4. Drugs

Although the “crisis” language is overblown, traffic across the border in illicit drugs has clearly been rising. However, as the second chart shows, nearly all of this happens at ports of entry, where the drugs are hidden in cars or trucks. Building a wall would have almost no effect on this.

5. Asylum

If there’s plainly no crisis in terms of border crossings, apprehensions, crime, or drugs, there is a humanitarian crisis at the border. The number of asylum requests has been rising steadily for the past six years, and the denial rate has risen from 55 percent to 70 percent under President Trump. However, this barely tells a fraction of the story: there are now over 800 thousand pending cases in immigration court, a backlog that will keep growing at an astronomical rate unless we hire more judges—which we need—instead of more border agents.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate