This week, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency announced that border patrol agents made 340,252 arrests in the September 2010-September 2011 fiscal year, a 53% decrease from fiscal year 2008’s 705,004 arrest, and only 20% of the 1.6 million arrests made during the 2006 fiscal year.
Border Patrol representatives optimistically attributed the drop to improved border security, increased efficiencies, and increased facilitation of legal travel into the US. Their statements failed to acknowledge, however, that the CBP statistics did not account for inflows of migrants that had escaped arrest. Furthermore, the CPB’s statement did not discuss the possibility that decreased levels of arrests may be the result of America’s economic downturn and decreased job availability. Nothing to be pleased about, certainly.
While the CPB may wish to maintain a positive façade and continue to insist that its border security measures are stemming illegal US immigration we’re troubled by the possibility that millions (if not billions) of US tax dollars are being wasted, either because vast amounts of illegal migrants are slipping past the CPS’s border security patrols, or because there is actually decreased interest in migrating to the US.
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Immigrants from certain countries with strongly emerging economies such as India and Brazil are now ‘reverse-migrating’ back to their home country due to better opportunities available there than in the U.S.