News Release

June 13, 2005

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Yet More Border Enforcement Will Not Stop Illegal Immigration
Cato study recommends temporary visas

WASHINGTON -- Despite increased enforcement at the U.S.-Mexican border beginning in the 1980s, the number of foreign-born workers entering the United States illegally each year has not diminished and will not without immigration reform, reports a study released today by the Cato Institute.

In the Cato Policy Analysis "Backfire at the Border: Why Enforcement without Legalization Cannot Stop Illegal Immigration," Princeton professor and Mexican migration expert Douglas S. Massey argues that America's repressive immigration and border policies have backfired, pushing immigration flows into more remote areas and resulting not only in a tripling of the death rate at the border, but also in a dramatic fall in the rate of apprehension. As a result, the cost to U.S. taxpayers of making one arrest along the border increased from $300 in 1992 to $1,700 in 2002 -- an increase of 467 percent in just a decade.

"Not only have U.S. policies failed to reduce the inflow of people from Mexico, they have perversely reduced the outflow to produce an unprecedented increase in the undocumented population of the United States," Massey writes. "America's unilateral effort to prevent a decades-old flow from continuing has paradoxically transformed a circular flow of Mexican workers into a settled population of families and dependents."

Massey recommends that Congress build on President Bush's immigration initiative to enact a temporary visa program that would allow workers from Canada, Mexico, and other countries to work in the United States without restriction for a certain limited time. Undocumented workers already in the United States who do not have a criminal record would be given temporary legal status.

In addition, he urges the U.S. government to accept the reality of a continent-wide integrated economy. While the U.S. government has pursued commercial integration through the North American Free Trade Agreement, it has sought to curb unilaterally the flow of labor across the U.S.-Mexican border.

Such a contradictory policy is bound to fail, says Massey. "In practical if not logical terms, it is impossible to create a single North American market characterized by the free movement of all factors of production except one," Massey writes. "The time is thus ripe for the United States to abandon its illusions and to accept the reality, indeed the necessity, of North American integration."

Trade Policy Analysis no. 29

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