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Arrests at Mexican/United States Border for Illegal Immigration Have Decreased

Arrests of unlawful immigrants along the Mexican and United States border are at the lowest amount since the Nixon administration, indicating that less individuals are trying  to illegally cross the border to work and/or live in the country. The progress could modify the argument on unlawful immigration from securing the border to handling the individuals who are already living in the country.

According to president of the Migration Policy Institute, Demetrios Papademetriou said that, “Increasingly the problem is the 11 million people (in the country illegally), rather than the border itself.”

In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 327,577 individuals were arrested by Border Control attempting to cross the southern United States border. Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deported a record 396,906 individuals over the same amount of time. That marks the first time in a very long time that official deportations from the U.S. outdid arrests at the border.

The amount of arrests of individuals  trying to sneak across the border has been progressively decreasing since 2006, after an all-time record of over 1.6 million arrests in 2000. During that decade, more immigrants have become permanent residents of the United States.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, nearly sixty six percent of the country’s anticipated illegal 10.2 million adult immigrants have been living in the country for at least a decade. Ten years ago, less than half had been in the U.S. that duration of time.

“This is all part of a larger picture that we’re not seeing very many new undocumented immigrants coming in, so the share of new undocumented immigrants is smaller,” said senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, Jeffrey Passel. “A lot of people are staying. They’ve put down roots. There clearly hasn’t been a large scale departure of people who have been here a while,” he added.

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