Debacles on the Border: Five Decades of Fact-Free Immigration Policy

Abstract

Since 1987 the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has compiled extensive data on the characteristics and behavior of documented and undocumented migrants to the United States and made them publicly available to users to test theories of international migration and evaluate U.S. immigration and border policies. Findings based on these data have been plentiful, but have also routinely been ignored by political leaders who instead continue to pursue policies with widely documented, counterproductive effects. In this article we review prior studies based on MMP data to document these effects. We also use official statistics to document circumstances on the border today, and draw on articles in this volume to underscore the huge gap between U.S. policies and the realities of immigration. Despite that net positive undocumented Mexican migration to the U.S. ended more than a decade ago, the Trump administration continues to demand the construction of a border wall and persists in treating Central American arrivals as criminals rather than asylum seekers, thus transforming what is essentially a humanitarian problem into an immigration crisis.

For more than three decades, the Mexican Migration Project (MMP) has annually gathered data on documented and undocumented migration to the United States from random samples of households in sending communities located throughout Mexico and from purposive samples in U.S. destination areas. Over the years, the project has compiled an extensive database of qualitative and quantitative data on patterns and processes of Mexico-U.S. migration. These data have been shown to provide valid and reliable information on patterns and processes of Mexican migration to the United States (Massey and Zenteno 2000; Massey and Capoferro 2004). The resulting database has enabled analysts to monitor trends and link shifts in the volume and composition of the migratory flows to specific social, economic, and political developments (Massey and Espinosa 1997).

The MMP data file currently contains information on 176,696 individuals living in 28,319 households located in 170 Mexican communities surveyed with a response rate of 92.9 percent. In addition to basic social, economic, and demographic data on each person, the survey gathers information on each person’s first and last trip to the United States (city, state, year, duration, occupation, earnings, and documentation) as well as the total number of U.S. trips ever made. In addition, it complies a complete history of migration and border crossing for all household heads and spouses (including the place and year of crossing, cost of crossing, use of crossing guide, number of apprehensions, place of destination, occupation, and documentation) along with detailed data gathered on the head’s most recent U.S. trip (financial activities, social relations, English fluency, terms of employment, taxes withheld, spending on food and housing, savings, remittances, and use of public services).

The purpose of the MMP is to provide representative and reliable data to inform public discussion of the causes, consequences, trends, and patterns of documented and undocumented migration to the United States. The project has been the recipient of a MERIT Award from the U.S. National Institutes of Health and in 2018 was honored with the Bronislaw Malinowski Award from the Society for Applied Anthropology in recognition of its contributions to understanding and serving the needs of the world’s societies using the concepts and tools of social science. The MMP data are annually updated and made freely available to users from the project website at https://mmp.opr.princeton.edu/. To date, data compiled by MMP have provided the foundation for 46 books, 96 book chapters, 305 refereed articles, and 74 doctoral dissertations. The database currently has 5,129 registered data users from around the world including analysts in government, business, and academia as well as the general public.

The journal in which this article is being published is owned by the American Academy of Political and Social Science—an organization whose guiding vision is to bring social scientific research to bear on important public policy issues. MMP data have supported a steady stream of analyses on the performance and efficacy of U.S. immigration policies over the years, but unfortunately, policy-makers have paid little attention to these analyses and their results, despite vigorous efforts to publicize them. Instead, the legislative and executive branches of government have formulated and implemented policies without any real understanding of the migratory processes they are ostensibly seeking to manage. Even as evidence steadily accumulated to indicate that U.S. policies were not only failing, but backfiring, political leaders persisted in supporting counterproductive actions grounded in political expedience rather than empirical reality. The results, in our view, have been disastrous, and have only served to divide and polarize the nation.

The willful denial of facts and evidence in the pursuit of politics that are disconnected from reality continues to the present. In December 2018, for example, President Trump partially shut down the U.S. government for more than a month to dramatize his insistence on the construction of a multi-billion-dollar border wall. This action went forward despite that Homeland Security’s own data indicate that the net volume of undocumented migration from Mexico effectively turned negative (more undocumented migrants leave the United States than arrive) after 2007 (Baker 2018) and that border apprehensions in 2017 were at their lowest point since 1971 (U.S. Customs and Border Protection 2018a, 2018b).

The collection of articles assembled here draw on data from the MMP to update a prior edited volume that made use of data from an earlier version of the database (Durand and Massey 2004). Both sets of studies offer the kinds of results and data that should have informed U.S. policies in the past, but unfortunately did not. We present this latest round of studies to provide a factual base for understanding the current reality of Mexico U.S. migration, in hopes that policy-makers and the public make wiser policy choices in the future.

Before summarizing findings from these new analyses, we draw on earlier research from the MMP to describe the immigration policy debacle that has unfolded since 1965. We then turn to official statistics to describe the situation currently prevailing along the Mexico-U.S. border. We conclude by highlighting results from the articles included in this volume to illustrate the insights that can be derived from facts and information rather than wishful thinking when making immigration policy.

Anatomy of a Policy Failure

Like many policy failures, the debacles that unfolded over the past 50 years began with good intentions. At midnight on January 1, 1965, Congress terminated a temporary worker agreement with Mexico known as the Bracero Program, which in the context of a burgeoning civil rights movement had come to be seen as an exploitive and racialized labor system. A few months later, Congress passed amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act in an effort to purge racial prejudice from the U.S. immigration admissions system. These amendments lifted longstanding bans on immigration from Asia and Africa and abandoned a visa allocation system that discriminated against southern and eastern Europeans.

In place of the earlier racist provisions, Congress created a new system that allocated each country up to 20,000 visas per year to meet needs for family reunification and labor force development. It originally set a ceiling of 170,000 total visas for nations in the Eastern Hemisphere and 120,000 for nations in the Western Hemisphere. The annual country-level limitations took effect in the former hemisphere in 1968 and in the latter in 1976 and in 1978 the hemispheric quotas were abandoned in favor of a world-wide cap of 290,000 visas. In enacting these well-meaning reforms, however, congressional representatives gave little thought to what would happen to an already well-established flow of Mexican migrants that by the late 1950s amounted to 450,000 annual entries by temporary workers and some 50,000 entries by legal permanent immigrants.

The conditions of labor supply and demand had not changed on either side of the border, however, and over the Bracero Program’s 22 years millions of Mexican workers had established contacts with U.S. employers who continued to welcome their labor. As a result, when opportunities for legal entry from Mexico suddenly evaporated after 1965, the flows did not end. Instead, they quickly reestablished themselves under undocumented auspices (Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). Although in one sense little had changed—the same migrants were crossing the border and going to the same destinations for short-term work with the same employers—in another sense everything had changed, since now the migrants were “illegal.” By definition, therefore, they were “criminals” and “lawbreakers” who could be framed by political and media entrepreneurs as a grave threat to the nation (Chavez 2001). Although a formerly legal flow of Mexican workers into and out of the United States had been criminalized, the employers of those workers were not under the terms of the famous “Texas Proviso” of U.S. immigration law, which explicitly prohibited the prosecution of employers for the hiring of undocumented migrants (Teitelbaum 1986).

After 1965, references to Mexican immigration as a “crisis,” “flood,” and “invasion” in U.S. newspapers proliferated (Massey and Pren 2012a). Political and media entrepreneurs framed the rising number of border apprehensions as a grave threat to the nation, seeking to inspire fear and trepidation for their own purposes. In a Reader’s Digest article, for example, the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service labeled the “silent invasion” of illegal aliens as “a national disaster,” imploring readers to contact their representatives to demand more funding for his agency (Chapman 1976, 188–89). In 1985, Ronald Reagan followed up by declaring it “a threat to national security” and warned of communist penetration from the south that would “feed on the anger and frustration of recent Central and South American immigrants” (Kamen 1990). TV personality Lou Dobbs (2006) identified the “invasion of illegal aliens” as part of a “war on the middle class.” Patrick Buchanan (2006), for his part, claimed it was part of a nefarious “Aztlan Plot” hatched by Mexican elites to recapture lands lost in 1848. Adding academic weight to this Latino threat narrative (see Chavez 2008) was Harvard Professor Samuel Huntington (2004), who emphasized the “demographic reconquest” of the nation by Mexico, telling Americans that “the United States ignores this challenge at its peril,” despite that Mexican migration to the United States was already in decline.

The propagation of this threat narrative energized a moral panic online and in the media (Flores-Yeffal, Vidales, and Plemons 2011) to set off a chain of events that brought about an unprecedented militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border, one that was entirely disconnected from the underlying volume of undocumented border crossing (Massey and Pren 2012b). Rising undocumented entries in the years immediately after 1965 increased the number of border apprehensions, which politicians and pundits trumpeted as “proof” of the ongoing “invasion,” thereby pushing public opinion in an ever-more conservative direction that in turn prompted political leaders to enact a steady accumulation of restrictive immigration laws and border enforcement operations (see Massey and Pren 2012b for a listing).

Although rising apprehensions initially stemmed from the rising volume of unauthorized traffic along the border, over time more enforcement resources generated more apprehensions irrespective of the underlying traffic, which continued to inflame the public to yield still more restrictive policies that produced even more apprehensions. Although undocumented migration stopped rising around 1979, this feedback loop drove the border enforcement effort steadily forward to unprecedented heights (Massey and Pren 2012b). Over the course of the 1990s and early 2000s, the momentum of rising border enforcement accelerated with the declaration of a new “war on terror,” which portrayed the Mexico-U.S. border as a key line of defense against any and all foreign threats (Massey 2018).

The ultimate result was a massive militarization of the Mexico-U.S. border that continued to accelerate even as the number of undocumented entries declined after 2000 and fell toward zero after 2007 (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2014). From 1986 to 2017, the border patrol’s annual budget increased from around $330 million to $3.7 billion in constant 2016 dollars, adding up to some $62 billion over the three decades between 1986 and 2016 (Massey 2018). Despite this huge expenditure, however, the size of the undocumented population rose from around 2 million in 1988 to around 12 million in 2008, and the rate of undocumented population growth actually accelerated during the 1990s—concrete evidence of a major policy failure (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016).

Paradoxically, the massive increase in border enforcement had no effect on the probability that a Mexican would head northward as an undocumented migrant. It also had no effect on the likelihood of apprehension at the border or the odds of successfully crossing into the United States over a series of attempts (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016). It did, however, significantly raise the costs and risks of unauthorized border crossing, causing trip durations to lengthen and rates of return migration steadily to fall (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2015). Having paid the costs and experienced the risks of graining entry to the United States, migrants were loath to repeat the experience of border crossing and put off going home, with many ultimately coming to arrange for the entry of spouses and children (yielding today’s population of “dreamers”).

With in-migration holding steady and out-migration falling, the net volume of undocumented migration ballooned and the rate of undocumented population growth nearly doubled (Massey 2018). What had formerly been a circular flow of male workers became a settled and rapidly growing population of families (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016). In the end, the United States spent $62 billion in border enforcement only to accelerate the growth of its undocumented population. The great irony is that if the United States had not militarized the border, net positive undocumented migration would have ended after 2000 of its own accord, with much less permanent settlement (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016).

Undocumented migration ultimately stopped not because of rising border enforcement, but as a result of Mexico’s demographic transition from high to low fertility rates. The total fertility rate in Mexico fell from 6.8 children per woman in 1970 to a value of 2.2 as of this writing. As a result, the average age of persons at risk of migration in the MMP database rose from 23.4 in 1972 to 45.9 in 2010 (Massey, Durand, and Pren 2016). Labor migration is highly age dependent, rising from low levels in the teens to peak around age 22–23 and then falling rapidly to low levels at age 30 and beyond. If individuals have not begun migrating by age 30, they are unlikely ever to begin migrating, and the average age in all of Mexico is, as of this writing, 29.

The Mexico-U.S. Border in 2019

The manifest failure of spending $62 billion only to accelerate undocumented population growth in a futile effort to curtail a migratory flow that would have eventually ended anyway has been lost on President Donald Trump. Rather than learning from the mistakes of past administrations, as of 2019 the president not only seeks to double down on a failed strategy by erecting a multi-billion-dollar border wall, he does so when Homeland Security’s own statistics indicate that border apprehensions are at a 40-year low (see Figure 1). As already noted, border arrests rose rapidly from 1976 to 1979 as unauthorized entries replaced the formerly legal flows of Braceros and legal residents. After a brief hiatus, the ascent resumed, driven forward not by more attempted entries but by the self-feeding cycle in enforcement we described.

Figure 1. Apprehensions along the Mexico-U.S border 1965–2017.

This cycle culminated in a peak of 1.7 million apprehensions in 1986 when the Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized some three million migrants, removing them from the annual inflow and causing a temporary decline. The self-perpetuating cycle quickly resumed, however, pushing apprehensions back up to 1.7 million in 2000. Thereafter the number of apprehensions turned sharply downward to reach a low of 310,000 in 2017, the smallest value recorded since 1971. This new minimum occurred despite the fact that the border patrol in 2017 had more than 19,000 officers, compared with just 1,500 in 1971.

The precipitous drop in apprehensions reflects the fact that undocumented migration from Mexico effectively ended during the Great Recession. Figure 2 shows the estimated volume of net undocumented by period from 1990 to 2017. The volume for Mexicans was positive through 2007, rising from 850,000 net entries during 1990–1995 to reach 1.55 million during 1995–2000 and peak at 1.85 million during 2000–2005. The flow remained positive at 659,000 during 2005–2007 but then turned decisively negative thereafter, with a net outflow of 1.35 million between 2008 and 2016 (though as shown in Figure 5, legal entries from Mexico continued).

Figure 2. Change in number of undocumented Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States.

Figure 5. New Legal immigrant arrivals temporary worker visas issued to Mexicans 1997–2017.

Notice that Central Americans constitute a significant though much smaller portion of the net inflow across all periods, equaling 150,000 in 1990–1995; 375,000 in 1995–2000; 300,000 in 2000–2005; and 659,000 in 2005–2007. Unlike Mexicans, however, the net flow remained positive after 2007, with a net inflow of 150,000 between 2007 and 2016. As a result, the share of Mexicans among border apprehensions has steadily fallen, dropping from 98 percent in 2000 to reach just 42 percent in 2017 (Massey, forthcoming).

Accompanying this shift in national origins is a change in the composition of migrants from workers to dependents. As shown in Figure 3, those arriving at the Mexico-U.S. border are increasingly traveling in family groups or as unaccompanied minors, and as Figure 4 reveals these categories overwhelmingly comprise Central Americans. Among those migrants apprehended while traveling in family groups, only 2 percent were Mexican, with the remainder divided between Salvadorans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans. Among unaccompanied minors, only 20 percent were from Mexico, compared to 22 percent from Honduras, 45 percent from Guatemala, and 10 percent from El Salvador.

Figure 3. Apprehensions of family units and unaccompanied minors along the Mexico-U.S border.

Figure 4. National origin composition of families and unaccompanied minors apprehended in 2018.

In sum, what had been a very large positive inflow of undocumented Mexican workers seeking jobs in the United States has now become a rather large negative outflow of Mexicans returning home, counterbalanced by a rather small inflow of Central American families seeking not jobs but refuge. The inflow of Central Americans stems directly from U.S. intervention in that region during the 1980s, when the U.S. government sought to topple the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. In the course of the intervention, per capita GDP in the frontline nations of El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua declined in real terms and did not return to pre-Sandinista levels until 2011. Even in 2018, GDP per capita in these nations remained only marginally above where it was 40 years earlier, and the violence unleashed by the intervention has never abated, yielding a homicide rate of 43.5 per 100,000 in 2016, more than twice the rate in the neighboring non-frontline nations of Belize, Costa Rica, and Panama (Massey, forthcoming).

The arrival of a relatively small number of Central American refugees and asylum seekers at the border is presently complemented by the continuing inflow of legal immigrants and a growing circulation by temporary workers from Mexico. Figure 5 shows the number of legal immigrant arrivals (U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics 2019) and temporary work visas issued (U.S. State Department 2019) from 1997 to 2017. As can be seen, over these two decades Mexican immigrant arrivals ranged from a low of around 116,000 persons in 2003 to a high of 219,000 in 2002 with an overall average of around 160,000 per year. The large number of legal Mexican immigrants is sustained owing to a surge in naturalizations, which totaled 1.3 million from 2007 to 2017. Each immigrant naturalized confers upon the recipient the right to sponsor the immediate entry of spouses, minor children, and parents without numerical limitation, as well as the right to sponsor adult children and siblings subject to numerical limitation.

In contrast to the relatively steady inflow of legal immigrants, the number of temporary work visas had progressively increased (except for a brief lull during the Great Recession), rising from 45,000 per year in 1997 to 252,000 in 2017. At a minimum, therefore, total annual legal entries (temporary plus permanent) are back up to levels last observed in the late 1950s. In reality, however, they are probably much higher, for whereas legal permanent immigrants are counted only upon their first arrival in the United States, all entries by holders of temporary work visas are recorded. Since temporary work visas are issued for multiple years, the number of annual entries by guest workers is thus always greater than the number of visas issued. In fact, total entries by temporary workers from Mexico rose from just 51,000 in 1997 to 906,000 in 2017 (U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics 2019). Thus, while undocumented migration from Mexico may have ended, Mexican immigration to the United States is hardly over.

Contributions of this Volume

In the next article, we set the stage for subsequent analyses by recounting the history and development of the MMP. We then use MMP data to trace the evolution of the Mexico-U.S. migration system from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. This summary highlights how shifts in U.S. immigration and border policies have always been critical to the definition of different eras of migration, including the current era of mass detention, deportation, and vigorous border enforcement despite the dramatic reduction in human traffic along the border. The article by Judith Boruchoff situates the MMP within the context of the boom in transnational studies that emerged during the late 1980s and 1990s. Although “transnationalism” portrayed international migration as “globalization from below” and predicted the emergence of a new “postnational” era of permeable borders and declining national sovereignty, it did not turn out that way. As she points out, in the end it was the actions of nation states and domestic politics that determined migratory outcomes and the subsequent course of development in the global political economy.

The article by Asad Asad and Filiz Garip focuses on the internal dynamics of Mexican migration as a social, political, and economic process. They argue that migration to the United States emerged in different communities at different times in response to historically specific circumstances that went on to yield path-dependent trends in migration. Political decisions in the United States created, expanded, and then eliminated the Bracero Program and introduced new restrictions on legal immigration from Mexico. The postwar economic boom in the United States, import substitution industrialization in Mexico, and the creation of a binational economy under the aegis of the North American Free Trade Agreement shaped and reshaped the forces of labor supply and demand. Whatever the politics or economics of migration’s origins, in many communities a powerful process of cumulative causation driven by the expansion of migrant networks and the creation of social capital took hold to drive migration forward irrespective of other considerations.

David Lindstrom’s analysis reveals that migrant networks were not only powerful in promoting migration to the United States, but over the past several decades they were key in facilitating the integration of Mexican migrants within the United States. However, whereas having family ties to U.S. migrants and experiencing a high prevalence of migrants within the community promoted integration linguistically (speaking more and better English) and socially (having social ties to more U.S. residents), they had no effect in promoting family integration (having spouse and children in the United States), employment integration (being paid by check and having taxes withheld), financial integration (filing a tax return and having a bank account or credit card), or asset integration (owning a home, business, or land in the United States). On these dimensions of integration, the positive effects of social capital, education, and U.S. experience are overcome by the negative effects of undocumented status, underscoring the continuing economic marginalization of Mexican migrants based on legal status (see Durand, Massey, and Pren 2016).

The analysis by Nadia Flores-Yeffal suggests that undocumented status can even inhibit linguistic integration. To the extent that unauthorized migrants are demonized and targeted for removal by state and federal authorities they will be pushed deeper into migration trust networks and thus away from broader engagement in American society, thereby inhibiting English language acquisition. The article by Asad Asad and Jackelyn Hwang suggests that linguistic and other forms of marginalization may be especially great for indigenous migrants. Compared to mestizos, not only are they more recent entrants into the migration stream with less U.S. experience, they tend to speak Spanish as a second language and in departing indigenous communities they are more likely to be undocumented and thus subject to the isolating pressures stemming from a greater reliance on migration trust networks.

In addition to the differential outcomes experienced by documented and undocumented migrants, another dimension of difference considered by MMP researchers is that of gender. Although males historically dominated undocumented migrants from Mexico, during the 1990s women increasingly became involved as circulatory migration gave way to settlement and processes of family reunification. The comparative analysis of network-based migration by Fernando Riosmena and Mao-Mei Liu suggests that sibling networks have contributed to the feminization of migration, especially in Mexico where sibling migration is quite common and movement by brothers and sisters is temporally correlated.

The article by Katharine Donato, Erin Hamilton, and Anthony Bernard-Sasges indicates that female migrants are more positively selected with respect to health than are male migrants. This finding is consistent with a wide variety of studies documenting greater positive selectivity for women on a range of characteristics. Patriarchal constraints on female mobility appear to demand more resources, power, status, and health of women than men in the initiation of migration. Once in the United States, the analysis of María Aysa-Lastra shows, Mexican women are more likely to send remittances for investments in human capital than male migrants, who are more likely to devote their remittances to improvements in housing and the acquisition of productive capital. These differences reflect the gendered socialization of Mexican women as nurturers and men as providers.

As noted in the introduction, the organization and composition of Mexican migration to the United States has undergone profound changes in recent years. In their detailed analysis of Mexican migration and return, Emilio Parrado and Angie Ocampo clearly describe the contours of this transformation. Despite the build-up of enforcement resources along the border, the probability of migration increased steadily from 1996 to 2001. It declined during 2002 to 2006 and then plummeted after the Great Recession. The analysis by Ricardo Mora Téllez suggests that this decisive shift occurred through the rapid transmission of information about the changed economic circumstances through social networks, warning off new entrants to the migrant workforce.

By the time of the economic recovery, however, Parrado and Ocampo suggest that U.S. migration had ceased to be a viable investment strategy for social mobility within Mexico and the few migrants departing today are motivated more by goals of family reunification than job acquisition. The authors also show that the probability of return migration has steadily declined, an effect explained by the sharp drop in the probability of return by undocumented migrants. In contrast, the likelihood of return migration has increased among the documented. As already noted, the historical back-and-forth movement of undocumented migrants has given way to a new circular flow of documented migrants, many of whom are increasingly traveling on temporary work visas.

According to the research of Bryan Moorefield, migrants holding H-2A and H-2B visas have come now to comprise “the backbone” of the new system of Mexico-U.S. migration. As he explains, these visas require migrants to work for a single employer at a specified job at a particular place for a specific period of time. These restrictive conditions effectively give employers monopoly control over their contracted workers, though Moorefield suggests that the expansion of the H-2 program into new industries and labor markets spanning state boundaries may provide migrants with more opportunities to challenge this control.

Finally, the article by Karen Pren and Enrique González analyzes the characteristics and nature of America’s H-2 program by comparing it with Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP). Although both programs recruit rural-origin Mexicans for temporary farm labor, H-2 workers earn higher wages and work shorter days than their SAWP counterparts. Total annual hours worked and cumulative seasonal earnings are quite similar, however, and both sets of workers remit roughly the same amount home each year, though H-2 workers do tend to return home with more savings for investment.

Conclusion

Since 1987, the Mexican Migration Project has continuously surveyed origin and destination communities throughout Mexico and the United States to build a large base of data that has been extensively analyzed by thousands of users. This cumulative body of research has built a solid empirical basis for testing theoretical hypotheses about the dynamics of Mexican migration. The MMP has also provided a sound empirical basis for evaluating U.S. immigration and border policies, and, in this regard, the MMP has painted a picture of unambiguous failure: immigration policies were “reformed” in 1965 without any consideration of the consequences for a large, well-established, and well-ordered migratory flow from Mexico already in existence, leading to the rise of undocumented migration.

The resulting unauthorized flows were overstated and misinterpreted as constituting a new threat, triggering a massive increase in border enforcement that paradoxically increased rather than decreased the net inflow of unauthorized migrants and accelerated undocumented population growth. Then net inflow of undocumented migrants began to slow after 2000 and reversed after 2007, leading to a decline in the size of the undocumented population. Although unauthorized migration from Central America persists, it is not enough to offset the net loss of undocumented Mexican migrants and the population is trending slowly downward.

Central Americans arriving at the Mexico-U.S. border today are not labor migrants seeking jobs but people fleeing circumstances of violence and economic stagnation caused by the Reagan administration’s military and political intervention of the 1980s. Rather than treating these arrivals as a humanitarian problem, it is framed as a national security issue that criminalizes migrants and relegates them to arrest, detention, and family separation. Moreover, undocumented migration from Mexico has ended and been replaced by a rising inflow of legal temporary workers, yet the Trump administration continues to demand the construction of a border wall. If one thing has characterized U.S. immigration and border policies since 1965 it is the profound mismatch between the problems at hand and the policy actions chosen to address them.