Everyone expected chaos. Since March 2020, the government had been turning away asylum seekers en masse without processing their claims under Title 42, a pandemic-era public-health policy. On May 11, the policy expired. President Joe Biden warned of coming disorder; Republican Representative Tom McClintock predicted that up to 700,000 illegal migrants would “bum-rush the border”; The New York Times dispatched correspondents to the Southwest in advance of an “anticipated surge.”
That surge never materialized. The Times reported “few signs of disorder” on May 12; “fear and confusion, but not chaos,” NPR wrote, noting that one prediction of more than 150,000 migrants waiting at the border “may have been overblown.” The following week, the Biden administration announced that unauthorized border crossings were down 50 percent.
The consensus prediction was chaos, and the consensus was wrong. About what, exactly? Narrowly, that Title 42 was responsible for holding back large numbers of migrants and that, once it ended, they would come en masse. But this mistake is a symptom of a broader misconception: that harsh border policies are what stand between the U.S. and a crush of migrants.
[Brian Elmore: The price of Title 42 is the battered bodies of my patients]
Let’s set aside humanitarian and economic objections to harsh deterrence policies, not because they are unimportant but because opposition is regularly dismissed as either the product of bleeding-heart leftism or a neoliberal attachment to the free movement of labor. Even without such considerations, these policies fail on their own terms. Deterrence policies have not succeeded at durably reducing unauthorized migration, nor have they produced order at the U.S. border.
Most people don’t want to leave their home countries, even when those countries are unstable and economic opportunity, or even safety, lies elsewhere. Migrants don’t take lightly the decision to abandon everything they know, only to put their lives at risk by crossing borders and, in many cases, contracting with smugglers. So why should we expect tweaks to U.S. border policy to affect whether people choose to make the journey?
People immigrate because of pushes and pulls. They may be pushed out of their home nation because of war, famine, persecution, economic devastation, or any number of natural disasters or political failures. They can also be pulled to other countries because of job opportunities or the desire to live with family members. For decades now, American policy makers have sought to reduce migration by making border-crossing less appealing. If the ordinary paths to enter the country are closed off, or if potential migrants hear hostile rhetoric, or if welfare policies are restricted only to citizens, then migration pressures at the border will abate—or so the thinking goes.
Prevention through deterrence has been a staple of U.S. border policy since the mid-1990s. Before that point, immigration control had largely been focused on catching unauthorized crossers after they’d reached the U.S. This new strategy was focused on changing migrants’ incentives before they ever left their homes.
Then-President Bill Clinton, concerned about reelection, pioneered a policy of blocking the main migration corridors in the Southwest, which the administration thought would “raise the difficulty, financial cost, and physical risk of illegal entry to such a level that deterrence would be achieved at points of origin in Mexico and other countries.” The 1994 Border Patrol Strategic Plan aimed to “control the borders of the United States between the ports of entry, restoring our Nation’s confidence in the integrity of the border. ” One assumption was that “alien apprehensions will decrease as Border Patrol increases control of the border.” The agency laid out what success would require: “The deterrent effect of apprehension does not become effective in stopping the flow until apprehensions approach 100 percent of those attempting entry … We believe we can achieve a rate of apprehensions sufficiently high to raise the risk of apprehension to the point that many will consider it futile to continue to attempt illegal entry.”
After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration created the Department of Homeland Security, folding in Customs and Border Protection and thus cementing the notion that U.S. immigration policy should fall under the banner of national security. The goal of deterring migrants has remained at the forefront of our border-control policy. The Secure Fence Act of 2006 (which passed the House 283–138 and the Senate 80–19) sought to achieve operational control of the border within 18 months, similarly defined as “the prevention of all unlawful entries into the United States.”
Donald Trump was perhaps the most vigorous supporter of prevention by deterrence, through attempted control of the border itself (the wall) and by making life for crossers miserable through a policy of family separation.
[From the September 2022 issue: ‘We need to take away children’]
If Trump embraced deterrence, the Biden administration has treated it more like an intermittent dance partner. It has promoted legal pathways to migration through parole programs for migrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti. Beginning in January 2023, applicants from all of these countries could be vetted before migrating. And in less than 30 days, people from these countries who were “apprehended, inadmissible, or expelled” declined by 75.8 percent. The administration also expanded the use of an app to allow migrants to make an appointment to seek asylum instead of having to present themselves to officials.
This administration has paired these expansions with several confusing and punitive measures for asylum seekers. Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the anti-immigration Center for Immigration Studies, told me these changes were “a low-calorie version” of Trump’s asylum rules, a viewpoint shared by immigration advocates. Comparisons to Trump policies of course make administration officials unhappy. But deterrence-oriented thinking has been present in the Biden administration since the beginning. A senior official told Politico that for Susan Rice, the former domestic-policy adviser, “it always comes back to punitive measures” to deter migrants. The Washington Post reported that Rice thought giving COVID vaccines to undocumented immigrants apprehended by border officials would encourage more migrants to cross the border. And The New York Times uncovered a memo in which Rice speculated that parents send their children across the border because of the U.S.’s “generosity” toward unaccompanied children.
For 30 years, politicians of all stripes have pursued prevention-by-deterrence. And yet migration flows have stubbornly resisted these policies. Attempts to undermine America’s pull factors have been unsuccessful. Restricting access to welfare benefits has failed to reduce border crossings because migrants are not coming from countries with generous and stable safety nets. They’re not giving up benefits, and they’re not expecting them. Cracking down on employers reliant on immigrant labor has failed to reduce migration as well because immigrants and employers largely get around these systems.
“Even in the face of family separation and children being ripped from the arms of their parents, you did not see a lowering of the number of people coming across the border to seek safety,” according to Shaw Drake, a Stanford Law lecturer and former ACLU immigration attorney. During the Trump administration, in February 2019, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported the highest monthly total of border apprehensions in almost a decade, and the following month, Trump’s own CBP commissioner said that the border was at a “breaking point.” At no time have border officials managed to apprehend the “sufficiently high” number of migrants necessary to reduce pressure once and for all.
Deterrence doesn’t work, because by deciding to cross borders, migrants have already accepted the tremendous risks that come along with that.
An ocean away, people brave extreme conditions for a chance at residency in the West. The Central Mediterranean is “the deadliest known migration route in the world,” with more than 20,000 deaths recorded since 2014; about one in 20 who attempted to cross in 2019 died trying. Here’s what these migrants risk on their journey: “dehydration, starvation, lack of access to medical care, arbitrary detention, kidnapping, trafficking, sexual abuse … physical violence … unlawful killings, slavery and forced labour, torture and ill-treatment, gender-based violence … extortion, and other human rights violations and abuses.”
European nations have repeatedly tried to deter migrants by enhancing the pain of border crossing: In 2014, the United Kingdom announced that it would not engage in search-and-rescue operations to prevent people from drowning in the Mediterranean. Earlier this year, video footage revealed Greek Coast Guard members rounding up and abandoning 12 people, including small children, in the Mediterranean. But the Europeans have mostly outsourced their cruelty to Libyan authorities, providing funding, training, and equipment for migrant deterrence in an attempt to keep their hands clean. A 2021 United Nations report accused Libyan authorities of firing at or colliding with boats in distress, capsizing boats, other acts of physical violence against migrants, and impeding humanitarian organizations seeking to aid migrants in distress.
Despite all this, in 2022, more than 100,000 people arrived in Europe via this route, up from 67,000 in 2021, 35,000 in 2020, and 14,000 in 2019. Interviews with people who survive the journey are illuminating. One Sudanese man told UN authorities that it took him four tries to cross to Europe. After one unsuccessful attempt, he and 41 other survivors were placed in a Libyan detention center, where he says he was beaten and given food only once a day. During his escape, he broke his leg, and several fellow detainees were shot by guards. He then successfully crossed the Mediterranean after spending nearly 30 hours at sea. Despite the election of hard-right anti-immigration leaders in Europe, “asylum seekers keep coming,” as the Times has reported.
Closer to home, some Afghans left behind after the U.S. evacuation of their country were willing to travel to South America and make the long, dangerous trek all the way up to the U.S. border with Mexico. “If 10 times I am sent back,” one man told the Times, “10 times I will return.” He and his wife were robbed by Mexican police and sent back to the border with Guatemala. They tried again and were jailed in Mexico.
Since the 1990s, the U.S. has invested heavily in border militarization and physical barriers. There were nearly five times as many Border Patrol agents in 2019 as in 1992. The agency’s budget swelled from $326 million to $4.7 billion over the same time period.
[Caitlin Dickerson: America’s immigration amnesia]
These investments have not yielded operational control of the U.S. border. In a widely cited 2016 paper looking at the effect of border militarization on undocumented migration from Mexico, Princeton researchers argued that “U.S. authorities have little to show for billions spent on border enforcement between 1986 and 2010” and concluded that these measures had “virtually no effect on the ultimate likelihood of entry.”
Border security may work in the short term. But migrants quickly adapt by taking alternative, more dangerous routes.
When Title 42 and related policies allowed officials to turn asylum seekers away without processing their claims, migrants tried crossing the Rio Grande or trekking through dangerous desert terrain. Our refusal to process asylum claims at ports of entry in an orderly fashion thus threw the system into chaos. In 2022, nearly every Colombian (99.5 percent), Venezuelan (99.8 percent), Cuban (99.7 percent), and Nicaraguan (99.8 percent) migrant arrived in the country by crossing rivers and deserts between ports of entry.
Title 42 did not deter migrants from trying to cross; instead, it seems to have caused them to try crossing multiple times, because their claims were never successfully heard or processed. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University—a research center that publicly shares and analyzes immigration statistics—of the roughly 1.2 million apprehensions at the border from March 20, 2020, through September 30, 2021, almost 60 percent were repeat attempts. Researchers found that 25 percent had been apprehended three or more times.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, the policy director at the pro-immigration nonprofit American Immigration Council, told me that “deterrence policies often cause people to freeze in place for a few months while they assess their options.” He pointed me to a January 2022 Mexican policy change that created new visa restrictions for Venezuelans who had been flying into Mexico then heading north to seek asylum. “That did in fact cause a very significant drop in Venezuelan apprehensions … for about five months, which is how long it took for Venezuelans to instead start walking to the border via the Darién Gap.”
When deterrence advocates look for examples of success, they tend to point to the Consequence Delivery System, developed in the mid-2000s. Until that point, Border Patrol agents had simply returned most unauthorized crossers to Mexico. Under the new policy, agents imposed “consequences,” including expedited removal with formal charges, criminal prosecution, and jail time. A 2020 paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research shows that migrants subjected to consequences were less likely to be re-apprehended after three months, though that effect diminished with time. A 2017 paper from the Cato Institute found that migrants were more likely to give up on attempting reentry in 2015 than in 2005, before the Consequence Delivery System had been implemented.
These modest successes hardly make the case for doubling down on deterrence, primarily because the system was developed in another age, when unauthorized migrants at our southern border were mostly coming from Mexico in search of work, and mostly moved among three states (Texas, Illinois, and California). These migrants regularly returned home. That is, until border-militarization efforts raised the costs of going home and turned what was once a circular, migratory population into a settled population.
In 2010, roughly 90 percent of migrants encountered between ports of entry were from Mexico. In recent years, that figure has cratered, hitting below 20 percent in 2019. The main drivers of this decline are widely acknowledged to have been the Great Recession and strengthening economic opportunities in Mexico relative to the U.S., as well as a demographic transition within Mexico resulting in an older population. (Migrating is generally a young person’s game.)
Migration pressure is no longer coming primarily from Mexican workers, but from people farther south seeking asylum, including large numbers of families and children. Regardless of whether they qualify for legal protection, most of these migrants are fleeing from devastating conditions, not simply shopping for economic opportunity, which suggests that “consequences” won’t make much of a difference.
In 2021, the Biden administration spent millions to fly more than 15,000 Haitian asylum seekers back to their country, where they faced the threat of gang violence and kidnapping following the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Contemporaneous reporting revealed that the administration hoped that flybacks would deter other Haitiians from attempting the journey. They did result in a short-term reduction in border crossings. But in April 2023, CBP reported 17,771 encounters with Haitian nationals, almost back to the September 2021 total of 17,966.
It’s not that deterrence doesn’t raise the costs of migration; it’s that people willing to make the journey have already overcome the natural human urge to stay put, the physical dangers of crossing multiple countries, and all the aforementioned associated risks.
A 2004 retrospective analysis about a decade-long experiment in raising the “difficulty, financial cost, and physical risk of illegal entry” along the main corridors of San Diego, California; El Paso, Texas; central Arizona; and south Texas found that “there is no convincing evidence that [enforcement] has reduced either the stock or the flow of unauthorized migrants from Mexico.” The Department of Homeland Security has reported a steady rise in the average fees that migrants paid to smugglers: what once cost less than $500 in 1981 cost nearly $4,000 in 2015. It notes that although “relatively few illegal border crossers hired a smuggler prior to 2001,” in 2015, 80 to 95 percent of apprehended border crossers did. U.S. policy has thus enriched coyotes, who may force their customers to “participate in smuggling controlled substances or other illicit items across the border.”
As my colleague Caitlin Dickerson wrote, senior Trump-administration officials considered family-separation a deterrence policy. Dickerson pointed to an email between a Border Patrol agent and a U.S. attorney that read, “It is the hope that this separation will act as a deterrent to parents.” Yet a report by the Center for American Progress found that monthly totals of border apprehensions actually increased after the zero-tolerance pilot policy began, in July 2017. The immigration reporter Dara Lind similarly uncovered that family apprehensions increased while the family-separation policy was in place.
Doris Meissner was the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) under Bill Clinton. After 9/11, INS was discontinued, its responsibilities folded into the newly created Department of Homeland Security. Before that, the agency was responsible for border enforcement, and Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, helped develop the prevention-by-deterrence strategy. I interviewed her by phone soon after Title 42 ended.
Meissner agrees that some deterrence policies have failed in practice. In testimony before a Senate committee in 2013, she recalled that the INS had not anticipated how readily migrants would adapt to border-security measures by finding new ways to cross. But she still believes in deterrence as a concept, and told me that she disagrees with those who “dismiss the notion of deterrence entirely and attribute [migration] to push factors completely.”
[From the May 2021 issue: America never wanted the tired, poor, huddled masses]
Meissner puts a lot of stock in what she calls “the most important deterrent”: adjudicating asylum claims quickly and then sending home those migrants who are not eligible under the narrow standards prescribed by the law. She believes that if people receive a fast and negative answer, that will dampen future waves.
Immigration restrictionists like Mark Krikorian believe Meissner’s proposed feedback loop can work. He additionally proposes restricting legal pathways to entry much more, so that would-be migrants come to believe that qualifying for asylum is virtually impossible: “It’s not that a specific press release is going to get a peasant in the western Guatemalan Highlands to change his migration decisions,” he told me. “But, if three-quarters of the people who left his village the previous year from that village all end up bused back, destitute because all the money they spent is now pissed away—because they failed—that will change people’s decisions.”
Both Krikorian’s and Meissner’s visions for border deterrence rely on achieving operational control of the border. Without that, we can’t send the message that entry is not going to happen. To underscore—again—how unreasonable this goal is, when she was DHS secretary in 2010, Janet Napolitano said the agency would never be able to “seal the border”; in 2015, she went so far as to call operational control an “absolutely unattainable standard.”
At any rate, survey data indicate that individual migration decisions are largely independent of U.S. policy. A 2021 paper based on surveys in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico found “no evidence” that making people aware of immigration enforcement policies changed their calculus about whether to migrate. Similarly, a 2018 paper also based on survey data—from interviews with more than 3,000 people in Honduras—found that “the overwhelming motivating factor for emigration” is direct experience with crime and the prevalence of local violence. Neither the likelihood of deportation nor the dangers of migration to the U.S. meaningfully affected respondents’ plans about whether to attempt the journey.
Why are so many people in government so determined to make deterrence work? In her 2015 comments, Napolitano also noted that operational control was “politically attractive.” And when I asked Meissner how the U.S. could realistically control migration flows, she similarly pointed to the politics of immigration. “If you’re in the government, you don’t get the luxury of saying this is hopeless … And especially with the way it’s being positioned now politically. It’s very clear that [in] the ’24 presidential election, this is going to be one of the major issues that impacts the next presidency, and so government does have to try to do whatever it can.”
Public opinion on immigration is complicated, to say the least, but these policies are actually making the political problem worse. By tightly restricting official ports of entry, we encourage migrants to take more dangerous routes. And when we turn them away, they try again. The Associated Press wrote last month that a 23-year-old man with his wife and newborn twin daughters reported being unable to use the Biden administration’s new asylum-application app and is therefore planning to cross the Rio Grande “like everybody else.”
These policies are also frankly inhumane. In just 10 years, deterrence policies claimed “10 times more lives than the Berlin Wall claimed during its 28-year existence,” according to the immigration researcher Wayne Cornelius. Last June, 53 people died in a trailer with no air-conditioning or water. Researchers have found that dehydration was a leading cause of death for migrants taking “random routes” between Nogales, Mexico, and Three Points, Arizona. The 2022 fiscal year was the worst on record for deaths of migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border, with 853 recorded deaths versus 568 in 2021.
For me, the most memorable death is that of Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, who was prevented from legally requesting asylum in the U.S. by CBP officers in 2019. In desperation, he tried to swim across the Rio Grande with his 23-month-old daughter. Both were swept away by the current and died.
Deterrence policies have produced images of asylum seekers trying to enter between ports of entry, of Border Patrol agents on horseback chasing Haitian immigrants, and of children dead in the water, as well as reports of skyrocketing crossing attempts, all making Americans feel like the situation at the southwest border is out of control. It’s a vicious cycle: Americans register concern about border chaos, then the government institutes harsh deterrence policies. Rinse and repeat.
No one knows when the next crisis will hit, or what it will be. It could be a climate-related disaster that displaces millions, or a war that sends political refugees running. The U.S. government cannot prevent global catastrophes, and attempts to address the “root causes” of migration are Pollyannaish at best. But the government can at least avoid pushing migration flows to more remote routes, which enriches coyotes and human traffickers, and keep experimenting with the aforementioned parole system. (It is working quite well but is unfortunately under legal threat.) And although this Congress won’t, Congress could invest in processing immigration cases faster, ensuring that legal pathways aren’t so difficult to access that people resort almost by default to unauthorized entry.
The costs of deterrence—family separation, injury, death—have all been justified under the cold logic that they are necessary to secure the border, or to reduce political pressure. But deterrence doesn’t create stability at the border, and it doesn’t calm voter concerns about people circumventing the legal process. Anyone asserting that being cruel to asylum seekers is smart politics isn’t giving you a hard truth; they’re repeating an easy lie.