President Trump had many faults, but he did put illegal immigration front and center as a policy issue. This brought outsiders like Steve Kuhn of Ideal Immigration and myself into an active policy debate, with the CATO Institute leading the way in organizing conferences and thinkers.
Under the Biden administration, all that seems to have evaporated.
Sophisticated policy analysis has been displaced by stripped-down left wing advocacy and a naïve commitment to niceness as policy. This in turn has appalled the average American, as have other hard left policies from the administration. As a result, the Democrats will be blown out at the ballot box next fall. Republicans are likely to hold at least one house of Congress or the White House for the following decade. As I have written many times, by choosing to prioritize open borders over normalization of status for the long-term undocumented, the left's immigration advocates -- the NILCs, the SPLCs and their like -- have effectively gutted the prospects of the Dreamers.
But the situation is actually worse on the right. 'The Wall' was the mantra of conservatives under Trump. If only the US could build a wall across the southwest border, one to surpass the Berlin Wall in scope and magnificence, the Mexican and Central American hoards could be kept at bay.
So what has happened to the enthusiasm for the Wall? Why has it disappeared as a clarion call for the right?
As was foreseeable, the success of the Wall rested on fragile foundations.
The Wall would not and does not stop illegal immigration. And best, it slows down potential crossers or forces them to use a different means of entry, of which there are myriad. A Wall will be totally ineffective if judicial rulings make it impossible to enforce or the political will to stop illegal immigration is missing. Both of those have happened. Various judicial findings, like the Flores settlement and subsequent Dolly Gee and Sabraw rulings, have prevented the deportation or holding of undocumented minors and the separation of minors from their parents, both complicating border enforcement. Moreover, the stunning turn to open borders under President Biden is a stark reminder that walls only work if Border Patrol is allowed to detain and deport illegal entrants.
One could put all the blame on the Democrats, but they are not the only culprits. US employers want access to the sort of unskilled labor the undocumented represent. Those Republican managers at chicken processing plants in Mississippi might talk a big game about illegal immigration, but make no mistake, they will hire illegals without a second thought. Nor does the US public have the stomach for tough-minded enforcement. The public simply won't tolerate images of illegal moms being rounded up and sent to detention while their abandoned children wait in vain for their return.
For all these reasons, many conservatives have come to appreciate that a Wall is not the same as border control.
Perhaps we can also claim a contribution is to disillusion with the Wall. In its fundaments, illegal immigration is a black market, with illegal immigrants looking to arbitrage the huge wage differentials across the Rio Grande. That simple. History tells us that the US has been singularly ineffective in beating back any black market using an enforcement-based approach. On the other hand, legalize-and-tax approaches have been remarkably successful.
To illustrate, let's consider the three main black market trade flows over the southwest border: illegal immigrants, hard drugs, and marijuana.
For fiscal year 2022, we forecast border apprehensions at nearly six times -- six times! -- their average for the 2012-2018 period. That is not slightly worse, it's absolutely catastrophic.
Hard drugs are no better. Using year-to-date data annualized, we project that hard drug interdictions -- hard drugs meaning cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and fentanyl -- will be nearly four times their 2012 level in 2022. Are we winning the war on drugs, now more than fifty years old? Or are we being slaughtered? The data is clear. We are being crushed.
Fentanyl is the worst. Before 2015, fentanyl was such a minor drug that Border Patrol did not even record it separately. For 2022, we anticipate fentanyl interdictions at 25 times the level of 2016, and three times the level of 2020. Fentanyl is the primary cause of 70,000 - 100,000 overdose deaths in the US every year. Hard drug smuggling over the southwest border is quite literally killing us.
But not everything is hard drugs. There is also marijuana. Historically, marijuana represented more than 99% of Border Patrol drug seizures by weight. How is that going? Are marijuana seizures like those of hard drugs?
In fact, pot seizures are down. But by how much? 10%? 20%? 30%? No, marijuana seizures are down 97% compared to 2012. 97%. As a practical matter, marijuana smuggling over the border has ended. Indeed, high quality US cannabis is coveted in Mexico, and it is entirely possible that the US is now a net exporter of marijuana.
How did we end marijuana smuggling? With elaborate border enforcement? No, we did not. The graph makes entirely clear that an enforcement-based approach to border control is a colossal loser. Even with four times as many Border Patrol agents as we had under President Reagan, we are catching no more illegal entrants than we did 36 years ago, and illegal immigration is at an all-time high. Is our current system viable in any sense? Will trying harder make things better? The numbers make it absolutely clear. An enforcement-based approach to border control does not work. Never has, never will. It is a total loser and a waste of money, time and energy. A Wall won't work and doubling the number of Border Patrol agents won't work, and not for one reason, but for many.
That's the realization slowly penetrating the thinking of the better analysts covering illegal immigration.