Border Crossing Data Show Incentives Matter

Illegal migration is primarily determined by ease of entry

This post touches on a live political issue. Nothing in this post should be taken as an endorsement of Republicans, Democrats, Trump, Biden, third parties, etc…

More than 10 million people have crossed the Southern border since Biden became President — a record.

Let’s put aside whether that’s good. First, let’s focus on what determines increases and decreases.

That’s an issue of dispute in American politics right now. President Biden argues that his hands are tied — that he needs Congress to pass new laws to prevent mass migration.

The legacy press seems to agree. For example, here’s Politico, implying that Biden needs new authority to close the border:

And here’s Biden, explaining why the bill won’t pass:

Because Donald Trump thinks it's bad for him politically. He'd rather weaponize this issue than actually solve it.

On the other side, Republicans and Donald Trump say that Biden caused the current border crisis, and that the bill to “give Biden authority” to close the border is a joke.

Who’s right? Let’s go to some data.

What caused the recent spike in migrant crossings?

I went to the Border Patrol website, took their poorly-graphed data, and graphed it over time:

We see that, immediately after Biden became President, migrant encounters skyrocketed, and never fell close to pre-Biden levels again.

Was it just a coincidence?

Here’s a headline from Biden’s first day in office:

It doesn’t take an economist to see how that might have changed the incentives for migrants.

But did Biden’s policies cause that flood of border crossings, or was it a coincidence?

Fortunately, more detailed government data exists. I’ve never seen it graphed out, so let’s do that:

The red line shows expulsions — people who are immediately sent back.

Dark green shows people let into the US, either on asylum claims, or on parole, or for any other reason, including at times for the sake of alleviating crowding at Border Patrol centers.

The light-green line titled “Likely releases in US” refers to people handed over by border patrol to HHS or ICE. Many such transfers are released in the US, based on Border Patrol’s data notes — but others are sent back. It’d take more work to figure out what percentage of that group are released in the US.¹

The brown line shows the relatively small number people who were required to “Remain in Mexico” instead of the US, while waiting for asylum decisions.

Why did border crossings spike when Biden became President?

On its face, the spike after Biden’s inauguration is actually a bit surprising to me because, when Biden took office, Title 42 remained in effect — that was a Covid-era regulation issued by Trump, blocking just about anyone from crossing into the US from a country with Covid exposure. Did Biden stop fully enforcing that?

Here’s the same graph, with those bars added:

From this graph, we can see that, when Title 42 was in place under Trump, attempt rose to pre-pandemic levels, but virtually every border encounter ended in expelling the crosser. However, Title 42 under Biden was not applied in the same way.

The CATO Institute explained how Title 42 was often not enforced:

The Border Patrol does not expel some immigrants for various reasons. Mexico has agreed to accept back immigrants only from Mexico, the Northern Triangle (since March 2020), Venezuela (since October 2022), Haiti, Nicaragua, and Cuba (since January 2023). For anyone else, it is much more logistically challenging to fly them to their home country. In March 2023, Mexicans were expelled 83 percent of the time, Northern Triangle immigrants 62 percent, Nicaraguans 60 percent, Venezuelans 57 percent, Haitians 10 percent, and all others were expelled just 8 percent of the time.

So it seems that discretion was used to not immediately expel many people. Instead, migrants were often released into the US, which encouraged more to keep coming at unprecedented rates.

CATO graphed it out. You can see how, despite Title 42 being in place in both administrations, non-expulsions skyrocketed as soon as the new administration took over in January 2021. It also shows that non-expulsions of single adult crossers (in blue) are almost exclusively a Biden-administration phenomenon:

Even when migrants were expelled immediately, the AP reports that under Title 42, they could just keep trying until they got lucky:

… there were no real consequences when someone illegally crossed the border. So migrants were able to try again and again to cross, on the off chance they would get into the U.S.

In general, the lesson from the data: If you let people in, more will come. If you stop people from getting in, they’ll stop coming.

Here’s another depiction of the same data above:

In May 2023, after Biden had announced that the Covid emergency was over, he ended Title 42.

The end of that, combined with Biden’s first-day-in-office repeal of “Remain in Mexico”, mean that there is now nothing preventing anyone from using the asylum “loophole” to enter.

The resulting spike has led even blue-state state governors like Ned Lamont of Connecticut to say that “maybe Democrats were a little slow to get up to speed on this.” It prompted NYC Mayor Adams to apocalyptically say that the border crisis “Will Destroy New York City.” (That seems unlikely. But it’s definitely straining the system.)

How we got here — asylum “loophole” basics

Let’s go back to this graph. In summer 2019, we can see that Trump faced then-record migration, as people around the world found out about America’s asylum policies.

Here’s how it works: Anyone in the world can come to a US border and ask for asylum. Then, regardless of whether they have a strong claim, they’re let into the country to wait for a hearing. That might work fine if the US had thousands of asylum judges at the border, giving immediate and firm decisions. But instead, the US has a years-long backlog to hear asylum claims. Sometimes people are even asked to show up at court a DECADE into the future, and the average wait time is 1,525 days (4 years.)

Once they enter, for 180 days, the migrants are not legally supposed to work. During that time, they often get local government assistance like shelter, food, and transportation. And after that period, they get an indefinite work permit while their asylum case is pending.

That gives a migrant a pretty clear path to a permanent life in the US, considering the setup in many states: New York, California, and 14 other states now give drivers licenses to immigrants there illegally — regardless of whether they snuck past border patrol, overstayed a tourist visa, feigned asylum — etc. Universities give financial aid. Some localities in California, Maryland, and Vermont allow undocumented migrants to vote in local elections.

When the asylum courts gets around to their cases, years down the road, most applicants won’t meet the definition of an asylum seeker / refugee, which is defined as persecution based on “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

But migrants will then have years of roots in the US. What are the odds that government will actually deport? To get a sense, consider that the government recently expanded DACA protections, saying it won’t deport people with US-citizen kids. (While it only applies if you came before 2010, a similar amnesty in the future seems likely.)

The asylum loophole should be common knowledge by now — but I think it’s not, due to the US media’s poor coverage of the issue.

The main barriers to moving to the US right now are geographical and linguistic.

People have to first get themselves to Mexico (which is expensive for most people in the world) and then trek up to the border region, through a Spanish-speaking country with some dangerous parts to it. And then settle in the US. That’s a deterrent for most people. But not the 10 million who came since 2021.

On the plus side, the current gauntlet should at least have some selection effect for risk-taking and resilience.

Did Trump close the border with “Remain in Mexico”?

As we can see from the graph, encounters fell immediately after Trump’s inauguration, probably due to his “tough” image, which was reinforced by media.

However, migrants soon realized that not much had actually changed in terms of enforcement, and began crossing again.

Reacting to the rise, Trump imposed a "Remain in Mexico" policy, which gave border agents the authority to make migrants asking for asylum wait in Mexico for their hearings.

The first document giving agents that authority was issued on January 28, 2019. However, government agencies are slow-moving, and by April 8, the ACLU estimated that merely “hundreds” had actually been returned to Mexico under the policy:

She estimated that hundreds of asylum-seekers had already been sent back into Mexico, with no clear way of coming back in for their hearings.

On April 1, per NBC, the administration pushed agents to actually use the policy:

[Trump’s DHS Secretary Kirstjen] Nielsen directed border agents to "return hundreds of additional migrants per day above current rates." It is not known how many migrants have been returned already.

We see that crossings did collapse rapidly once people were actually sent to Mexico to wait for asylum there. It seems to have worked — despite the relatively small number of people who actually had to be required to wait in Mexico, that seems to have signaled to others that it wouldn’t work to come.

A few months later, Covid happened, Title 42 was added, and crossings fell even more.

Why did Biden repeal “Remain in Mexico” on his first day?

“Remain in Mexico” was repealed on the grounds that it was inhumane to ask people to wait in Mexico. Biden explained in 2021:

"Rolling back the policies of Remain in Mexico, sitting on the edge of the Rio Grande in a muddy circumstance with not enough to eat and — I make no apologies for that."

Countering that: Mexico is right around the world average in terms of income, and while its crime rate is above average, many regions of the country are safer than US cities.

Does Biden already have the authority to stop crossings?

The history shows that the answer is yes.

If Biden implemented the same policies Trump did, the crossings would get back under control, just as happened after the 2019 spike.

Mexico is allegedly no longer interested in a “Remain in Mexico” rule, but it’s the kind of thing that can usually be negotiated. Even if it couldn’t, a similar deal could be reached with another country.

I won’t go into details of the much-touted border bill:

But I will quickly note that the bill gives the President discretion to NOT make deportations even if a “border emergency” is triggered. It’s full of language like:

Is the open border a good thing?

Many libertarians, leftists, and liberals think it’s good to have an open border. Maybe they’d prefer things to be more orderly, but I know many people who prefer the current system to a strictly-enforced border.

I do think it’s very possible that we’ll look back in 50 years and see the current wave of migration in the same way we now see Irish and Italian migration, which were once controversial.

That said, I can also less positive pathways. Let’s list some pros and cons:

Plausible pros:

— Most of the migrants are hard workers.

— A bigger population, all else equal, makes the US more influential in the world.

— More low-skilled workers brings prices down.

— 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants tend to largely assimilate to US averages.

— Migration is clearly good for the productivity of the migrants themselves.

Plausible cons:

— Immigrants tend to be more pro-socialism, which could change the uniquely-competitive US economy for the worse.

— Migration from most of the world is inherently redistributive due to racial attitudes in the US. For example, if 1/3rd of the US population is hispanic, then universities aim to have 1/3rd of college graduates be hispanic, and any deviation from that is chalked up to discrimination. The US Supreme court decision last year is a step towards mitigating this.

— Low-skill migration competes with low-skill Americans, who least need the competition.

— Migration on a mass scale may end up moving the “values” of the US closer to the global average, rather than whatever values made the US exceptional.

— Low skill immigration might particularly be a burden if AI starts putting people out of work in the near future (then again, it looks like ChatGPT-like AIs might put white-collar people out of work before blue-collar workers?)

Media outlets seem afraid to have a real discussion

The media seems hesitant to have any kind of immigration debate that goes beyond “don’t be racist!” Certainly any serious list of pros and cons like the above doesn’t get featured. I assume some people get offended by it.

I respect people on both side who make serious arguments. On the open borders side you have Bryan Caplan and Alex Nowrasteh, and on the closed-borders side you have people like Noah Carl, Ryan Gidursky, and the Center for Immigration Studies.

But I don’t think the media has done a good of informing people about this issue, hence this post.

Conclusion: Border crossers respond rapidly to incentives

That probably falls under “common sense”, but now we’ve seen some data to back it up.

1. Specifically, regarding migrants released to ICE, Border Patrol says it “Includes noncitizens transferred to ERO for additional processing and custody determination, including persons booked into ICE custody as well as those enrolled in Alternatives to Detention and/or otherwise released without being booked into ICE custody.”

Regarding migrants released to HHS, Border Patrol says it “Includes Unaccompanied Children transferred to the care and custody of HHS.”

To determine the proportion of these categories which are ultimately removed from the US vs. allowed to stay would require an extensive search of ICE/HHS datasets.