Now, more from the Cato Institute conference on immigration economics. Two sociological researchers discuss the findings of their decades long work tracking immigration and emgrags patterns, this is an hour and 10 minutes. Thank you so much, everyone. My name is phillip. Im the managing director for immigration at the center for american progress, im excited to be moderating this discussion with two top notch scholars of unauthorized migration. The question of Border Security, whether we do or do not have a secure border and how we measure what Border Security would mean, sits at the heart of every debate over immigration policy in this country. Its what well be talking about today with two different perspectives. Consider this the u. S. Now employ employs we spend more each year on Immigration Enforcement than on all other federal Law Enforcement combined. Apprehensions at the southern border, a statistic that scholars use for people trying to cross the border without status, those apprehensions are at 40 year lows. For all we know about the inputs. Actually measuring what we know to be a secure border has been both elusive and divisive. Scholars are in general agreement that the unauthorized population peeked in 2007 and has dropped ever since. There are 10. 9 million unauthorized immigrants in the u. S. Today. So to put this another way. Unauthorized immigration is declining and for countries like mexico, its now net negative. Why this decline, and whats contributing to it. Whether Border Security has played a role in that decline. Or frankly, whether Border Security has been largely ineffective or has missed its intended targets. Weather Border Security deters unauthorized migration, will be one of the key questions in any type of Immigration Reform conversation, whether next year or at any time in the future. If Border Security is effective, then the question obviously becomes what types of Border Security are effective than others. Should we be putting our limited resources toward building a wall or maybe putting more boots on the ground or more technology or Something Else entirely. If Border Security is not effective, given how much we spend on it each year, should we be putting this money and resources elsewhere . And are there parts of Border Security that are less effective than others . Douglas massey is professor of sociology and Public Affairs at princeton university. And codirector of the mexican migration project. An annual surgevey for nearly 3 years. Quantitative research. Hes recently worked in the institute for defense analysis. In 2010, he was the assistant director for border and immigration programs at the office of Program Analysis and immigration at the department of homeland security, and he previously worked in dhss office of policy. He holds a ba from the university of pennsylvania and a ph. D. In massachusetts. Please join me in welcoming our panelists. Professor massey, well start with you. Its a pleasure to be here today, ive been studying mexican immigration for a long time now. And one thing i learned is that when Congress Makes immigration policy, it doesnt make policy with any knowledge of immigration, its not really trying to achieve anything. Politicians in congress are responding to domestic political issues. How is it going to affect me in the next election. How can i use immigration to gain resources for my agency or support a cause i like. When you look at immigration policy, it tells you more about americas hopes and aspirations and its fears and apprehensions than anything else. And to understand where we are right now we have to go back to the 1960s. It was more about hopes and aspirations. Ending jim crowe, deracializing Public Policies that have been deracialized for decades at the federal level. And so what im going to do is give you a short History Lesson and talk about where they are now and present some data. What you see on this screen is a summary of immigration flows from mexico over the past 60 years. In the late 1950s we have three lines there. The blue line here is legal immigration. The reds line is temporary worker immigration. And the green line here is the proxy for undocumented migration. And that is border apprehensions, divided by the number of Border Patrol officers. You get a rough proxy. Im not saying this is the actual number of undocumented injuries, but this is the trend you see that back in the 1950s, right after Operation Wetback ramped up apprehensions along the border, the United States was importing about 450,000 guest workers into the country from mexico every year, and at about legal immigration, permanent residents was running at about 50,000 per year. In the late 1950s, there were half a million mexicans coming to the United States each year, 450,000 of them were circulating back and forth, and studies show that even among legal permanent residents, a huge fraction were using their documents circulating back and forth. Its a heavy circular flow. 1965 comes along, and its hopes and aspirations, the Civil Rights Act passes in 1964. The Voting Rights act passes in 1965. Congress amends the immigration and nationality act not as a tool to achieve any objective for immigration necessarily, but to deracialize and deprejudice a system that had been put in place in the 1920s, that had banned asian immigration and african immigration, and set up quotas to favor northern and western europeans and discriminate against jews and catholics and reduce the number of overall immigrants. By the 1960s, its the civil rights era. Theyre bent out of shape about how congress talked about their grandparents. Immigration reform was about civil rights and redressing past wrongs. And it was debated very much as a civil rights era, the southerners were against it. One of the things they insisted on, if youre going to change the immigration system, i want to put a limit on the immigration from the western hemisphere, thats where brown people are. Congress rewrote the act, and created a preference system that gave preferences to family members, relatives of family members already in the United States. A smaller segment to labor needs of the United States. And this was used to allocate visas outside the western hemisphere initially. The western hemisphere before 1965 had no limits. Mexicans could enter in unlimited numbers. It was about 50,000 per year. They capped the hemisphere at 120,000 visas, by 1976 had ramped down the quotas to 20,000 countries per year. And a global cap of 290,000 visas. Also in 1965, midnight between 1964 and 1965, congress let the brussero legislation expire. In 1965 there was a dramatic break. Congress, if you read the debates, they didnt talk about we have a half a Million People coming in from mexico every year, how is this going to affect things. Its are there going to be more asians here, are we going to keep more brown people out. What happened in 1965, there was a massive break in the system. And you see it there, and thats the genesis of the era of migration. You have a half a Million People coming into the United States with legal visas, to a new system, where the temporary Worker Program is gone, and legal permanent visas are capped at 20,000. What happens, the flows had been established over the past two decades, all the migrants in mexico are connected to employers in the United States, it was institutionalized into expectations and practices on both sides of the border, the flow simply quickly reestablished itself under undocumented auspices. It expands from 1965 to roughly 1979, 1980 and then stops growing and begins fluctuating. So basically, during the 1970s, the labor flows that prevailed in the 50s were reestablished, on now the vast majority were circulating under undocumented auspices. That created a new dynamic, whereby since theyre illegal migrants, they must be criminals and law breakers. Latinos in it general and mexicans are portrayed as a grave threat to the nation. And a series of metaphors are brought out to explain this to the public. Theres the flood metaphor where illittle migrants are going to flood america, drown its culture. Over time, the metaphor that won out was the marshall metaphor of the United States being invaded by the alien army, its territory is being occupied, migrants were launching bonn day charges at the border. Border patrol officers were trying to hold the line against the alien hoards, you can see this in the figure here. I did a content analysis of leading newspapers, the washington post, the l. A. Times, and the wall street journal, looked at references to mexican immigration as a flood crisis or invasion, in leading newspapers, and you can see the rise in these parallels paralleled the rise in undocumented migration peeks. Every time theres a peak, theres another piece of antiimmigrant legislation that is enacted. What this did was set off a dynam dynamic, where you had this effect from outside the system where there was a massive change in policy, and migration ends. And illegal migration increases, you get a big increase in illegal entries, which, of course, drives up apprehensions, which becomes the visible manifestation of illegal migration, pushes the country in a conservative direction, and these are parameterized estimates that i use from the General Social survey, and other sources, and that drives the move toward restrictive legislation, restrictive operations, increasing the number of Border Patrol agents. The size of the Border Patrol, and in the end that produces more line watch hours, hours spent patrolling the border, if you have more people and more resources devoted to catching more people on the border, you catch more people on the border. That feeds back on the system. Illegal immigration peaks in 1979 and begins to fluctuate with no secular trend thereafter. Apprehensions continue to rise, not because more people are coming, but because more and more effort is put into catching those who are coming. And it becomes a selfperpetuating dynamic. The head of the Border Patrol gets out and puts out a press release, the alien invasion is continuing, because apprehensions are rising therefore we need more resources, more resources are made available. More apprehensions becomes a selfperpetuating cycle. You can see this in our next table here. The index trend. This is the raw number of apprehensions, just keeps going up and up and up, even though the trend really has flat bed out and this resulted in progressive mill tarization of the border. Exacerbated by the cold war and the war on terror in the 90s and 2000s. And you can see this massive increase in border enforcement, this is the in 2013, this is the Border Patrols budget in real terms. You can see its flat from 1970 to 1986 when the Immigration Reform and control act passes, to start the process. It starts it very slowly. And then in the mid 1990s, a whole series of laws are past, really boosted it up, and that peaks here, and then 2001 patriot act, and that puts it through the roof. Now, remember that illegal migration inflows peaks about here. So all this is occurring well after the flows and peaks, and really by 2000, the flows are already beginning to decline into the United States. So this massive mill tarization which was completely disconnected from the underlying traffic along the border occurred, and it had pronounced effects. Not necessarily the ones that were intended. Im going to read out what the effects were, and then im going to show you data that supports the views. That i outlined. At the border, the effective militarization shifted the places migrants crossed. And shifted the geography of migrant settlement, creating a whole set of new destinations throughout the United States. It also increased the increase of coyotes, border smugglers, it increases the cost of using coyotes, it had no effect or limited effect on the probability of border apprehensions, despite all the resources put into it, and it had virtually no effect on the likelihood of getting into the United States. But it did increase the risk of death and injury during border crossing, thats what the changing reality on the border, and how did these changing realities affect migrant behavior. According to the data that we marti martial, there was no likelihood taking your first undocumented trip. Youre not discouraging someone from leaving for the United States without documents. It did decrease the likelihood of a return from a first trip. And decreased the likelihood of taking an additional trip and returning from an additional trip. It didnt stop the basic inflow, but it stopped the out flow. And that had serious consequences. Captions Copyright National cable satellite corp. 2008 captioning performed by vitac