Border Arrests Rising Rapidly, INS Officials Say

After 2 1/2 years of steady decline following passage of the sweeping 1986 immigration reform package, arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border have begun to surge, signaling a possible renewed wave of illegal entries, according to officials.

Between May and September, U.S. border guards from San Diego to Brownsville, Tex., apprehended more than 435,000 suspected illegal immigrants, an increase of almost 25% over the same period of 1988.

“The numbers are going up, and we’re concerned,” said Duke Austin, spokesman in Washington for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

But the warning of increased illegal crossings is based upon statistics--arrests along the border--that, while widely repeated, are also widely questioned. The apprehension numbers, critics argue, are on the rise because of a range of factors--among them INS staffing and priorities, seasonal shifts in migration and changes in policy and law. Using arrest figures alone to claim that illegal immigrants are once again streaming into the United States, these critics say, can be misleading.

“I think the figures’ value has always been very problematic,” said Wayne A. Cornelius, director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego and a leading researcher of immigration issues.

Yet the border arrest statistics have long been trumpeted by INS officials as the single most effective indicator of illegal immigration. For decades, the numbers have played a key role in U.S. immigration strategy. In the 1950s, immigration authorities cited higher arrests to justify widespread sweeps of suspected illegal migrants. In the early 1980s, rising arrests led to calls for new controls, culminating in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.

That law, analysts say, has further eroded the reliability of arrest statistics as an indicator of illegal immigration. Several provisions of the statute have clearly had an impact on the border arrest totals, which at first declined precipitously.

A major reason is the newly legalized status for more than 3 million amnesty recipients--almost 75% of them Mexican citizens and more than half residents of California. That has meant that far fewer people have to cross the border illegally; they can now go back and forth freely. Not surprisingly, the number of legal crossings has risen considerably since 1986, and contributed to the decline of illegal crossers.

In addition, the law gave new responsibilities to U.S. immigration authorities, drawing some resources away from border enforcement, and leaving some agents in the undermanned San Diego border force openly skeptical of claims that the law was deterring illegal entry.

“They (policy-makers) have to prove that the law they wanted is doing the job,” said Steven Garcia, president of Local 1613 of the National Border Patrol Council, the officers’ union. “If we had more agents, we’d definitely have more arrests.”

INS officials, especially former commissioner Alan C. Nelson, were quick to seize upon the post-1986 drop in arrests as evidence of the deterrent effect of new penalties against employers who hire illegal aliens. The so-called employer sanctions--a centerpiece of the 1986 law--were meant to dry up the illegal migrant job market.

But skeptical researchers, aware of the lack of success of similar sanctions in various U.S. states (including California) and in Europe, question the link. Illegal aliens have easily managed to circumvent the new requirements through use of false documents and other means, according to several studies.

Some critics, notably Jorge Bustamante, director of the College of the Northern Border, a Tijuana-based research institution, have argued that the INS has manipulated staffing in a deliberate effort to inflate or deflate the arrest numbers to achieve its policy goals.

“There’s a manipulation from the top,” said Bustamante, who also writes a popular column for El Excelsior, the Mexico City daily. “The agency has been lying to the American people.”

U.S. officials deny any attempt to deceive. “I think they (the numbers) are the best barometer there is” of illegal immigration, said Austin, the INS spokesman.

One weakness, as INS officials concede, is that the apprehension numbers are inflated. The statistics measure only arrests, so anyone arrested several times, as frequently happens along the border, is counted with each arrest.

Nonetheless, the volume of arrests along the border is staggering, particularly in the San Diego area, the single busiest crossing point along the border. On Nov. 5, U.S. Border Patrol agents based here recorded 1,219 arrests of migrants, or an average of about 50 per hour. More than 90% were Mexican nationals. Among the 102 non-Mexicans apprehended were 41 Guatemalans, 36 El Salvadorans, 11 Nicaraguans, four Hondurans, two Egyptians, two Colombians, two Chinese and one citizen each from Bolivia, Belize, India and the Dominican Republic.

Historically, authorities have used the arrest numbers as barometers of unauthorized immigration from Mexico. After World War II, apprehensions of illegal aliens began to double and triple annually, peaking at more than 1 million arrests in 1954.

Authorities took action, instituting the infamous “Operation Wetback,” arresting thousands. Caught in the net were many legal U.S. residents--and even U.S. citizens--residing in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Some immigrants, even though in the country legally, fled back to Mexico.

The ferocity of that operation has not been forgotten in Mexico, where the 1986 immigration law revisions sparked fears of similar actions.

In the years after “Operation Wetback,” the border arrest numbers gradually declined, reaching a low of about 29,000 apprehensions in 1960. A sharp upward trend began in the 1980s, as the Mexican economy worsened, and reached its apex in 1986, when authorities recorded 1.6 million arrests of immigrants along the border, a record. Again, as in the mid-1950s, there were calls for drastic steps to stem the “invasion.” The response this time was passage in October, 1986, of the immigration reform package.