Anti-Immigration "Think Tank": Eliminating the Border Patrol Will Halt Illegal Entries

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 12:59 PM on July 31, 2008.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) — the “non-partisan research” arm of John Tanton’s formidable anti-immigration empire — would be a source of endless laughs if not for the fact that some take their “research” seriously.

(My favorite CIS release was a “study” that supposedly revealed that there wasn’t a shortage of native-born farm-workers — it was just another liberal media hoax all along. The central argument: “Production of fruits and vegetables has been increasing. In particular, plantings of very-labor intensive crops such as cherries and strawberries have grown by more than 20 percent in just five years.” So, there are enough farmworkers to pick those crops after all! Never mind that the Dept. of Agriculture estimates that 50 percent of our current farmworkers are undocumented migrants and unofficial estimates range as high as 70 percent.)

Anyway, they have a new one focusing on recent Census data suggesting that the undocumented population is declining, and they try to walk a fine line with it. While explicitly noting that the economic downturn is likely a contributing factor, they strongly imply that the surge in harsh and basically ineffective immigration crackdowns has played a large role.

The Immigration Policy Center put out a release that made quick work of CIS’ claims:

A new report released by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) on Wednesday, July 30th, claims that stepped-up enforcement measures account for much of the recent decline in the undocumented immigrant population. The following is a statement by Angela Kelley, Director of the Immigration Policy Center, an immigration research organization in Washington.

"CIS implies that the illegal immigrant population could drop to half of what it is now within the next five years if only presidential candidates keep silent about the details of comprehensive immigration reform, taxpayers continue to pour billions of dollars into enforcement, and the U.S. economic recession persists-according to CIS, reducing illegal immigration apparently comes with a cruel price tag.

Most researchers agree (PDFthat undocumented immigration to the United States is driven largely by economics. Yet, in a new report entitled Homeward Bound: Recent Immigration Enforcement and the Decline in the Illegal Alien Population, CIS dubiously claims that undocumented immigrants decide where to live and work based more on the politics of immigration enforcement than the economics of their own survival. CIS concludes that the recent decline in the "likely illegal population" (which it defines as less-educated, foreign-born Hispanics age 18 to 40) is largely the result of new immigration-enforcement efforts rather than the downturn of the U.S. economy, including job losses in the construction sector that had been absorbing many less-skilled Hispanic immigrants.

The persuasiveness of CIS' argument is undermined not only by an absence of hard data, but by the faulty logic and contradictory statements of the report itself. The authors report confidently about a population that is nearly impossible to accurately measure. They admit they did not include data about any population other than Hispanics. They provide no evidence for their assertion that the immigration debate in Congress last summer spurred an increase in undocumented immigration.

Most of CIS’ “research” findings could be easily dispatched by a drunk twelve year-old, because their central rhetorical device is to conflate correlation with causation (that didn’t stop the pinkos at the New York Times from taking their latest report seriously). There’s been a bunch of showy raids recently, and it appears the undocumented population has been declining. Ergo, the raids must have played a significant role in that decline (never mind that the number of undocumented immigrants coming in appears to have peaked in 2000 and several indicators suggest it has been declining since).

I like it — it’s a simple game, and quite a lot of fun. So let me try!

Between 1994 and 2005, spending on immigration enforcement increased by 1200 percent, and look at the result:


Click on graph to enlarge

Although other factors may be at play -- they always say something like that -- this strongly suggests that increasing the resources used for enforcement leads to more illegal entries and an increase in the undocumented population. So maybe it's time to defund the border patrol and stop this madness once and for all.

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Tagged as: immigration, cis, tanton, astroturf

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.