Immigration: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
 

Matt Mayer

The Obama Administration has claimed that the southern border is secure because apprehension rates for illegal border crossings are down.

The Pew Hispanic Center, using data supplied by the Obama Administration, bolstered this claim by issuing a report that found that illegal border crossings are down and large numbers of illegal immigrants are returning to Mexico.
At least that is what they say the data says.

According to those men and women whose job it is to secure the border, however, the Obama Administration’s statistics are misleading. Border patrol and immigration enforcement employees interviewed by the Washington Times said that

[S]ecurity is being compromised as the government seeks to keep a lid on the border as a campaign issue during the presidential election cycle. Department of Homeland Security’s Border Patrol agents and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are being told not to make arrests of noncriminal illegal immigrants, and not to patrol areas of high traffic along the roughly 2,000-mile Southwest border.

A Border Patrol official working along the Texas border said administration officials are deliberately failing to document what is actually happening on the border. “In many cases my supervisors make it clear that they don’t want increased apprehension numbers, which means no arrests,” he said.

The government is also failing to patrol hundreds of miles of federal wildlife reserves that fall under the jurisdiction of the Interior Department. That has given smugglers and illegal immigrants a clear corridor to enter the county and has skewed national arrest figures, an official said. The U.S. is allowing “drug and human smugglers in without a fight” in parts of the Southwest, he said.

Ironically, by not securing the border and making apprehensions, the Obama Administration can claim that the number of illegal border crossing is down because of their efforts to secure the border.

One illegal immigrant is quoted as saying that “few, if any, of her Baltimore neighbors in a community consisting largely of illegal immigrants have fled back to their homeland.” As further proof that illegal immigrants aren’t leaving America, “Statistics from the Bank of Mexico, that country’s largest bank, showed that remittances totaled $3.29 billion in January and February, up 7.9 percent over the same period last year. Remittances to Mexico are on a pace to total about $19.7 billion this year, according to the recent reports.”

This ostrich approach to border security is bad policy and puts Americans at risk, as it just might not be illegal migrant workers and drug couriers running through that clear corridor.