Guest Column

FENCING IN FAILURE: Effective Border Control is Not Achieved by Building More Fences
By Jason Ackelson, Ph.D.
Immigration Policy Center 
April 20, 2005

New proposals for more fencing and Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border only perpetuate an unsuccessful policy that does not effectively enhance national security or control undocumented immigration. Policymakers need to recognize that a truly smart border policy which will ensure security, facilitate trade, and justly manage migration will not be achieved by building yet another fence.

Highlights from the report:

  • President Bush’s Fiscal Year 2006 budget would increase funding for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to $6.7 billion. Next to defense spending, this is one of the highest growth rates in the federal government.
  • On March 16, 2005, the House of Representatives attached an amendment (the REAL ID Act) to the $81.3 billion emergency supplemental to fund the war efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq that would give the Secretary of Homeland Security sole discretion to push forward the construction of border fences, roads, and other barriers by waiving all applicable laws.
  • Border fencing has merely channeled undocumented migration to more remote and dangerous terrain. After triple-fencing was constructed in San Diego, apprehensions of undocumented immigrants fell from 450,152 in FY 1994 to 100,000 in FY 2002, but apprehensions in the Tucson sector increased 342 percent during this same period.
  • Building a fence along the entire southwest border would cost roughly $9 billion (about $2.5 billion more than the total budget of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in FY 2005) and is an ineffective means of combating undocumented immigration.
  • The undocumented population in the United States has continued to increase despite ten years of fairly consistent and large increases in the border-enforcement budget and a parallel surge in the number of Border Patrol agents stationed on the frontier.
  • The growing economic integration of the United States and Mexico, as well as the openness of U.S. society, dooms to failure any border-control strategy that focuses primarily on security at the physical frontier.
  • An alternative approach to border security is suggested by the Smart Border accords the Bush administration negotiated with Canada and Mexico in 2001 and 2002, which represent a move towards virtual borders where inspections occur overseas or away from the land border entirely.

Read the entire report at: http://www.ailf.org/ipc/policy_reports_2005_fencinginfailure.asp

For more information contact Benjamin Johnson at (202) 742-5612.

The Immigration Policy Center (IPC) is dedicated exclusively to the analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States. The IPC is a division of the American Immigration Law Foundation, a nonprofit, tax-exempt educational foundation under Section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code.

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