Thread: Manpower boost isn't winning border battle

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Manpower boost isn't winning border battle
Immigrant arrests down since 2000 despite rise in agents


11:58 PM CDT on Tuesday, June 6, 2006
By MICHELLE MITTELSTADT / The Dallas Morning News


WASHINGTON – It seems obvious: Adding 6,000 Border Patrol agents, as President Bush wants to do over the next two years, should spark a major surge in arrests of illegal crossers at the porous U.S.-Mexico border.

But that outcome is far from guaranteed.

Even as the Border Patrol has swelled from a force of little more than 3,000 agents two decades ago to 11,500 today, apprehensions have not increased appreciably – and in fact have risen and dipped in ways that even veteran immigration experts can't fully explain.

What is clear is that increased manpower doesn't automatically translate into more arrests. Or make a dent in an illegal immigrant population that grows by half a million people annually and stands at an estimated 12 million.

In 2000, the peak year for apprehensions, a Border Patrol force of 8,200 agents nabbed nearly 1.7 million illegal crossers.

Four years later, with manpower up by 2,200 agents, arrests were down by more than half a million.

In fact, the Border Patrol's nearly 1.2 million arrests in 2004 closely paralleled its record in 1987 – when its force was one-third the size.

"It's really mind-boggling, in many ways, that we're tripling the size of the Border Patrol and we have no idea how effective it is," said Deborah Meyers, a senior analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute.

She and others cite a number of possible reasons for the lack of a direct correlation between manpower and arrests: Illegal immigration may not be consistent year to year; the rise of sophisticated smuggling organizations; and lowered arrest rates may be a sign that deterrence through increased Border Patrol visibility is working.

But T.J. Bonner, who heads the National Border Patrol Council, the agents' union, offers a different explanation: an enforcement strategy implemented in the latter 1990s that places more premium on using agents as a deterrent rather than having them roam the border to make arrests.

"No one is deterred, but it ties up resources and marries [agents] to a fixed plot of ground and doesn't allow them to patrol and respond to intrusions," Mr. Bonner said. "They stubbornly cling to this strategy when it's insanity to do so."

Agents' effectiveness, as measured by the number of apprehensions, has dropped, he said. In 1987, each agent accounted for 357 arrests on average, a figure that had plummeted to 110 by 2004.

Officials at Customs and Border Protection, which is the Border Patrol's parent, defend the deterrence strategy as the proper model.

"We are meeting the illegal traffic where it is coming in," Customs and Border Protection spokesman Mike Friel said. "And we are using all of our resources proportionately to face that head-on."

Tactics questioned
While few suggest the Border Patrol be kept at its current strength as the U.S. struggles with illegal immigration, some question whether the administration's costly border enforcement push amounts to the most effective use of resources.

Rather than adding 6,000 Border Patrol agents – and using 6,000 National Guardsmen as a stopgap until the agents can be hired and trained – the administration would be better served, they say, by tackling the main instigator for illegal immigration: jobs.

The manpower devoted to going after rogue employers through work site enforcement investigations has plunged in recent years – even as Border Patrol hiring has surged over the past decade.

"The problem, over the past decade, is we have focused on border enforcement to the exclusion of all the other vital aspects of immigration control," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors reduced immigration. "If a car has four wheels and you inflate one wheel and let the others go flat, that's not going to get you anywhere."

In a trip Tuesday to the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia, N.M., Mr. Bush described the hiring plan as a cornerstone of the administration's effort to control the border. "Americans expect us to secure the border," the president told Border Patrol trainees. "And so we're going to double your size and we'll get you new technologies."

But some suggest the enforcement push owes less to effective enforcement than to the president's need to persuade skittish members of Congress to endorse his plan for a guest worker program and legalization for most illegal immigrants now in the country.

"I'm in the camp that border enforcement is crucial and it is part of any comprehensive solution, but I believe that this particular action of the National Guard and of the focus on the border has much more importance for its political message than for its practical benefits," said Doris Meissner, who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Bill Clinton.

Only part of the plan
To view the Border Patrol buildup in isolation would be a mistake, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a recent interview, describing border enforcement as one prong of a multifaceted strategy that will include increased prosecution of rogue employers and a legal path for foreign workers.

"We have to step up our interior enforcement, but we also have to create a pressure valve to release some of the pressure that economic migration is putting on the border," Mr. Chertoff said. "If you rest everything on the border and you don't do any of the other elements of comprehensive reform, you are making it very difficult for the Border Patrol to carry out their job."

What will be difficult for the Border Patrol to do is tackle an unprecedented expansion in a short time, experts say.

"To ramp up that quickly is extremely difficult," said Ms. Meissner, the former INS commissioner. "That is an enormous scale-up."

While challenging, it can be done, administration officials say.

"It's an effort that we can accomplish," Mr. Friel said, noting that the Border Patrol Academy in Artesia has received an infusion of funds to expand the facilities where all incoming agents undergo 19 weeks of basic training.

But some in Congress remain unconvinced.

"It takes about 35,000 applications to get 1,000 agents – and the capacity to train is extremely limited," Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., said during the Senate immigration debate last month. "The track record of this department in this area is not stellar."

E-mail mmittelstadt@dallasnews.com

I am always amused at articles like this...SWELLED border patrol agent numbers, up from 3000 to over 11,000. They want us to be impressed, but ask yourself this...why are our taxes paying to create a 28,000 body border patrol force for Iraq, which has a population of only 25 million, while we here in America with a population well over ten times that number are supposed to be happy with a paltry border force of only 11,000 agents? Do the numbers, and it makes no sense, and even doubling the size to over 22,000 is going to be inadequate.

Less than ten percent of our military forces are in Iraq, a war that we should not be involved in. Lets take 200,000 troops and put them on our Southern Border, and finish building the wall across all 2200 miles of our Southern Border...when that is finished, and our Southern Border is totally secured we can address the shortcomings in our Security along our border with Mexico.