Arrests of Illegal Aliens Rise 29% in a Year

Reversing a three-year decline, arrests of illegal aliens in the San Diego area--the nation’s major alien-smuggling corridor--rose by 29% during the last fiscal year, leading immigration officials to estimate that total arrests along the Mexican border will top 1 million.

Almost 475,000 illegal immigrants were arrested in the San Diego area during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, officials said.

Although border-wide figures are not yet complete, federal officials said they anticipate the overall figure from California to Texas to top 1 million, for a nationwide increase of almost 25%. It is the first such rise since the immigration reform law passed.

“It’s not alarming, but we have to say that the trend is in the wrong direction,” said Duke Austin, spokesman in Washington for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The figures also indicate that while more Mexican nationals are heading north, fewer Central Americans are making it to U.S. territory--a fact that experts attribute to an ongoing crackdown against illegal immigrants by officials in Mexico, the nation traversed by most Central Americans en route north.

The 1990 arrest numbers are still far short of the record 1.6 million apprehensions recorded border-wide during fiscal 1986, when the rising tide of illegal immigration eventually prodded Congress to pass its most recent major overhaul of U.S. immigration law. (On Tuesday, the House of Representatives took action on the latest immigration-revision plan, voting to expand considerably the number of immigrants allowed into the United States each year.)

The increase in arrests during fiscal 1990 is the first since 1986, when Congress passed the landmark Immigration Reform and Control Act, the most sweeping reform of U.S. immigration laws in two decades.

Several components of that law are believed to have discouraged illegal immigration, particularly the law’s so-called amnesty provisions, which eventually resulted in temporary legal status for more than 3 million foreigners, half of them California residents. Many of those now-legal residents had entered the United States illegally via the U.S.-Mexico border.

The 1986 law also included provisions that made it a crime to hire illegal aliens. But authorities say many immigrants easily circumvent that barrier by buying fake documents widely available on the black market. The failure of employer sanction provisions and the consequent widespread availability of jobs for illegal aliens is a key reason that rampant illegal immigration continues to be the norm, according to U.S. policy-makers.

On a more fundamental level, observers say that the continuing weakness in the Latin American economies--particularly in Mexico, the principal source of illegal immigrants--has prompted more and more people to come north. In the United States, unskilled immigrant workers often can earn $5 an hour--an amount that is considered a high daily wage in much of Mexico and Central America.

“The economic pressures that are pushing from Mexico are so great that they are coming in spite of all of our efforts,” said Ted Swofford, a supervisory Border Patrol agent in San Diego.

Federal officials keep close tabs on the border apprehension figures, which they consider the single best barometer of illegal immigration. The figures are somewhat inflated, though, because many individuals are arrested multiple times.