Immigration as deterrance does not work

Interesting podcast episode attempts to keep Latin American migrants out of the US have had the opposite impact

25:11

We built a wall to keep Mexican migrants out. In fact, the wall has kept them in. People who would otherwise have gone home stayed so long they've put down roots. In March of 2016, Douglas Massey, along with Jorge Durand and Karen Pren, published a brilliant paper in the American Journal of Sociology, Why Border Enforcement Backfired, in which they ask a hypothetical question. What would have happened if the United States had done nothing over the past 30 years, frozen the budget and staff of the border patrol at 1986 levels, allowed for some circular migration?

MG

25:52

The researchers estimate the undocumented Mexican population of the US would be about a third lower, a third lower than it is now. This is according to the people who know more than anyone else about Mexican migration, who have access to one of the biggest immigration databases in the world, and what is their conclusion? That the attempt to solve the problem of illegal Mexican migrants is what has caused the problem of illegal Mexican migrants. You can just hear the frustration in Douglas Massey's voice.

DM

26:29

For me, I've been watching this train wreck in real time for the past two decades, really. And I kept trying to tell people that when it comes to border enforcement, less is more and if you militarize the border, you're going to produce a larger undocumented population. I said this before the House Judiciary Committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Immigration.

MG

26:49

And what happens after Massey testifies? The same thing happens every time. Nothing.

DM

26:55

And then the ranking minority member, who's Representative King from Texas, gets up and basically says, "Take your lying data and go home because we know what the truth is. We're being invaded and we've got to stop this."

MG

27:09

Massey says we need to do the exact opposite of what we're doing now. When we raised the cost of crossing the border, that shut down circulation. If you want to restore circulation, then you should make the border easier to cross, reduce the size of the Border Patrol; don't increase it. Make it easier for migrants to get legal status; not harder.

DM

27:32

If you want to lower the number of Mexicans living in the United States, give them green cards and a lot of them will go home. The US is not that nice of a place for people, for Mexicans these days, but they have families here. They've got US-born kids and, if they know they can come back, they'll go home.