Border Crackdown Paradox Studied

A new study focusing on California farm communities suggests that increased enforcement along the U.S.-Mexico border has had the unintended effect of bolstering the illegal immigrant population by discouraging many successful entrants from ever returning home.

“People are still getting in through the border, and because it’s tougher to get back in once they leave, they’re staying longer,” said Philip L. Martin, an economist at UC Davis who is co-author of the new study published by the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

This seeming paradox--that heightened enforcement may wind up swelling the ranks of illegal immigrants--has been the subject of speculation for some time, but the study released Thursday tends to confirm what is an emerging academic consensus.

A recent report by experts from the United States and Mexico similarly concluded that many longtime cross-border “sojourners” had decided to settle permanently north of the border.

The findings raise fundamental questions about a national immigration strategy that largely focuses on border enforcement while doing relatively little to penalize farmers and other employers who hire undocumented labor.

“This shows up the failure of U.S. immigration policy,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who is one of the nation’s preeminent authorities on Mexican immigration and has found similar results.

In the past decade, the government has more than doubled its Border Patrol forces and committed an unprecedented amount of enforcement funds and hardware from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. The pressure, Massey said, has largely served to increase the prices charged by smugglers and push the undocumented traffic away from well-policed hubs such as San Diego and into the expansive deserts and mountains to the east, where Border Patrol ranks are still stretched thin.

Clinton administration officials strongly defend the border buildup as an essential means of deterring even more illegal immigrants from crossing or attempting to enter. However, authorities did not dispute the likelihood that the building pressure has served to turn temporary illegal immigrants into permanent settlers.

“It’s a predictable response,” said Eric Andrus, spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, who characterized the phenomenon as evidence of success at the border. “This is another sign that our efforts to control the border are working.”

Nonetheless, INS Commissioner Doris Meissner and other officials have long acknowledged that a border strategy lacking a corresponding effort against the employers who hire undocumented workers is unlikely to succeed.

Heightened workplace crackdowns, extremely unpopular among business groups, do not enjoy the broad congressional support of bolstered enforcement along the border. Employers have faced civil and criminal penalties for hiring illegal workers since 1986, but numerous studies have shown that loopholes allow the practice to continue largely unabated.

The new study found that the undocumented percentage of the California farm work force has skyrocketed from less than 10% in 1990--after the amnesty program of the late 1980s--to 40% today, and is still climbing. Today’s enforcement push appears inadequate to blunt a movement driven by Mexico’s sagging economic fortunes, the study found, even though authorities may have succeeded in making the cross-border trip more difficult and costly.

“There is no reason to believe the level and composition of current migration flows from Mexico will change significantly in the near future,” stated the report, titled “Poverty Amid Prosperity,” a reference to the low income of field hands toiling in California’s booming, $25-billion agricultural industry.

Although the new study focuses on the agricultural sector, its findings resonate in urban Southern California and elsewhere because field work remains a prime employment entry point for illegal immigrants who later move on to service jobs, factory work and other employment. The finding that today’s illegal immigrants are more likely to remain permanently than they were a decade ago appears to be common knowledge in the sprawling immigrant neighborhoods of Los Angeles.

“Today, one feels trapped here,” Lino Vazquez, a 36-year-old undocumented day laborer from Mexico, said Thursday as he stood outside a hardware store on Sunset Boulevard seeking construction work.

Vazquez’s story is in many ways typical. A former pharmacy cashier in Mexico City, he said he crossed the border into San Diego 10 years ago, paying a smuggler $300, which covered transportation from Tijuana to Los Angeles.

“It was like a day in the country,” Vazquez said of the trip, although he added that two of his companions had to travel in the trunk of the smuggler’s car through San Diego.

Today, smugglers routinely charge $1,000 or more to take someone from Tijuana to Los Angeles, a trip that can now drag on for days as guides direct their charges on circuitous routes past border guards and checkpoints. Although Vazquez said he would like to visit his parents and five siblings in Mexico, he added that that returning to the United States after such a trip would simply cost too much and involve too many hassles.

The study from the Urban Institute paints a bleak picture for the future of immigrants to rural California, despite an ever more prosperous farm economy.

“Rather than sharing in this prosperity,” the study found, “farm workers find low earnings and unstable, seasonal employment, with few possibilities for mobility.”

The newcomers to rural California typically crowd into small towns, such as the San Joaquin Valley communities of Parlier and Madera, where their public service needs increasingly overwhelm local governments, the study said. The San Joaquin Valley produces some of the nation’s highest public assistance rates, the study found, with high welfare use among the U.S.-born offspring of immigrants.

The result, the study found, is a de facto shift of Mexican poverty to rural California.